The long-dreaded day of reckoning for New Jersey’s extravagant, unaffordable public worker pension system has finally arrived and is knocking on the door. Condition legislators — even Democrats who are all too eager to play the role of Step ’n’ Fetchit for that large, powerful open employee unions — have abandoned their attitude of denial and responded using a bundle of expenses to fend off the collapse of the program.
The Mr. Magoo-like unions, though — the Communication Workers of America, N.J. Education Association and others — persist in their inability to understand the bold-print, underlined writing for the wall. Their place is the pension program should be fully funded and the price be damned — regardless from the condition from the economy or stressed-out taxpayers’ individual finances.
Belated attempts to save the system by containing expenses are now taking shape in a package of bills in the legislature. The unions see this work as an attack for the system, not a rescue. Legislators, particularly Democratic ones, will simply need to discover to ignore their bellyaching rather than fretting more than it as in the past.
Given the pension system is reckoned to be overloaded with more than $30 billion of unfunded upcoming liabilities — that’s, promises created the condition can’t deliver — the emerging legislative rescue is a modest sufficient work.
One invoice proposes removing union officials in the taxpayer- subsidized pension gravy train. The sponsor of this invoice, Assemblyman Paul Moriarty, D-Gloucester, wonders why taxpayers ought to be subsidizing the pensions of people who function for the unions, not the public. Good question.
Another invoice, sponsored by Sen. Barbara Buono, D-Middlesex, would cap retirement payouts for unused sick leave at $15,000 per public worker retiree. But is a program that’s $30 billion-plus in arrears and is a leading propellant behind New Jersey’s skyrocketing, highest-in-America nearby property taxes in any place to be handing out like giveaways? Such arrangements don’t exist within the private sector. These payouts ought to be eliminated, not capped.
Another pension program reform invoice has ominous implications and ought to have a stake driven via its heart lest it 1 day transform itself into a fiscal monster and sink vampire-like fangs into taxpayers of the upcoming. This dangerous measure proposes a constitutional amendment obligating taxpayers annually to fully fund the pension claims the politicians in Trenton make, no matter what, arrive hell or higher water.
All in all, the pension-rescue work, even though a vast improvement more than the condition of denial that previously prevailed in the Statehouse, veers perilously close towards the precipice of too little, also late.