By The PA. AFL-CIO
– Governor Corbett held a news conference on Tuesday, June 17 threatening to hold up passage of a state budget unless legislators approve a badly flawed pension Bill that even the Bill’s co-sponsors admit won’t provide short-term budget relief.
It may also result in Governor Corbett breaking two of his campaign promises. The one he made to the voters – passage of on-time state budgets. The other – the Grover Norquist pledge he signed to never raise taxes, which he has already broken when he signed legislation that eliminated the cap on wholesale fuels.
President Bloomingdale and Secretary-Treasurer Snyder issued an immediate response to the Governor’s threats, saying that the Governor’s billion dollar budget crisis is of his own making and now he is pushing a pension scheme that independent actuaries say will do nothing to save money in the current budget. It will however, cut retirement benefits of younger teachers, nurses, librarians, and thousands of public service workers by up to 40 percent.
“If we want to solve our budget crisis, we have to look at the real culprit – the billions in outsized taxpayer giveaways to corporations. Governor Corbett gives away $3.9 billion a year in corporate welfare – more than enough to fully fund our pension system. We cannot balance Pennsylvania’s budget on the backs of workers who have never missed a payment into the pensions system,” President Bloomingdale said.
During the press conference, the governor indicated that he would consider reducing the “pension collars’” which would once again lower employers’ required payments to the pension system, adding to the Commonwealth’s pension debt.
Reducing what the state and school districts are required to pay into the pension systems is how we got into this mess in the first place,” Secretary-Treasurer Snyder added. “It allows employers to put their payments on a credit card and run up the bill. This was a bad idea 15 years ago, and it’s an even worse idea now,” he said.
• The proposal was introduced by State Rep. Tobash and supported by Governor Corbett. If enacted into law, it will not provide any relief in the state budget, and any savings to Pennsylvania’s pensions system would be decades away – if there is any significant savings at all under the plan’s provisions. These are the facts which Rep. Tobash admitted in a June 4 news conference.
• An analysis of the Tobash/Corbett plan by the Keystone Research Center found the measure would force new, mostly young employees to pay for the past mistakes of their employers. What it doesn’t do is save the Commonwealth substantial money, now or in the future. (New Pension Plan a Step Backwards, available online at www.keystoneresearch.org).
• Cheiron, a Virginia-based actuarial firm hired by the State’s Public Employee Retirement Commission, also concluded in its May 26 analysis of the Corbett/Tobash plan that any savings from the Corbett-Tobash plan would not be realized in the FY 2014-15 state budget, and payments due to the pension would still have to be made.
• Cheiron concluded: “For new employees, the loss of retirement security is greater than the value of the cost savings for the Commonwealth.”
• The CLEAR Coalition, composed of labor unions representing middle-class workers, has proposed a series of revenue-generating options and cost-cutting solutions to help Pennsylvania’s state government meet its responsibilities and serve its citizens. Read more about it at www.clearforpa.org.
You are encouraged to share these points when meeting with your legislators.
Source: http://www.paaflcio.org/?p=4195&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook
