Ohio

Thanks right back to you. I firmly believe that we might not have been able to accomplish this if the good people of Wisconsin hadn’t shown the way. Many Ohioans will be be rooting for (and contributing to) the Walker recall campaign.

It’s unfortunate that they also strongly supported Issue 3.

Or as I call it, the “Full Employment for Lawyers Amendment”. I was hoping the large No on 2 turnout would swamp it, but people can still be sucked in by plausible-sounding bullshit and inexplicably there was no organized campaign to get the truth out.

(For non-Ohioans, Issue 3 was a teabagger-written state constitutional amendment that purports to nullify the Affordable Care Act in Ohio- which of course it can’t actually do- but which as a side effect will tie almost all state laws affecting health care in knots and assure many years of pointless and wasteful litigation.)

“And to tell anyone who doesn’t yet know that, in an exceptionally high turnout, Ohio voters defeated their state government’s union busting legislation by a large majority.”

Unusually high turnout, eh? Smells like vote fraud, dontcha think?

Also too: Tentative and conditional congratulations, but also wild and enthusiastic applause, to Arizonians for trouncing Russell Pearce.

SB 5 had a provision that would have specifically taken away the right of university faculty to unionize. So its defeat is a real victory for faculty unionization.

What a horrible horrible result for America. Are Ohio voters going to vote for the taxes to close the pension gap? F no. No chance of that ever happening.

More mindless signalling. We likes Teachers and Police! Yeah Teachers and Police! Double boo taxes!

But hey the pension gap is only 1.26 Trillion dollars and growing. [For the nation as whole.] So BFD.

Disgusting.

As an Ohioan (for a few more months), I have to say it’s a proud day.

What I’d like to know, though, is when will people realize that Republicans always overreach when they get elected. It’s not as though there are any moderate Republican politicians left anymore. If you vote R, you vote for an extremist agenda every time.

It would be nice if people would finally figure that out. Instead, they repeatedly act shocked when the Republicans they elect trash the place.

The voters of Iowa State Senate District 18 quietly prevented the Republicans from completing their domination of the state government by electing the Dem, Mathis, 56 % / 44 %. Only a one-seat majority in the State Senate, and the courage and acumen of Majority Leader Gronstal, have prevented in Iowa the kind of destructive teabaggery that we’ve seen in Wisconsin and Ohio.

Sorry to respond to sometroll, but for the record, Ohio’s pension systems (especially mine, PERS) are actually in much better shape than most public pension systems. Not one of the systems has asked for tax dollars.

The other fact that merits response to the troll is that those employees have already paid for those pensions, which is part of their compensation in an officially negotiated contract.

Why they think pointing out to the public that police and teachers shouldn’t get pensions because conservatives have raided the till is good strategy is beyond me.

Again, the board of OPERS has been recommending for the past two years adjustments that would cost not a single tax dollar and would restore full 30-year funding of both funds (retirement and health). The response of the Republican legislature? [crickets]

Transparent lies are another thing that’s not a good strategy. But some people just can’t help themselves.

Look at all the public employees calling the tax payer a silly fool for pointing out 1+ trillion dollar pension gap.

http://downloads.pewcenteronthestates.org/The_Trillion_Dollar_Gap_final.pdf

Promising to grossly over pay Harry, ScentOfViolets, Steve LaBonne, and the rest the nations public employees in the form of unfunded pension benefits will not keep the rich from getting even richer it will only make tax payers like me poorer.

So, if pension funds are not fully funded at the moment, then everybody must be against collective bargaining? Something seems to be missing there, in the middle.

those employees have already paid for those pensions, which is part of their compensation in an officially negotiated contract.

I always find it interesting how libertarians, who are supposedly all about the Sanctity of The Contract, love the notion of reneging on pension plans.

Again, yes, the study lists Ohio as solid performer. In comparision to other mis managed states. Which is like saying someone weighing 400 pounds is in pretty good shape when compared to 700 pounders.

Again -It is still badly managed 87% of pension benefits and 36% of health care and other benefits are funded. And that is in 2008 at calculated ROR of something like 8%.

‘Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner. As a member of a union I took lower pay than my private sector counterparts with equivalent education in exchange for better benefits and more job security. This was the deal.’

No. The deal is you spend the most on the electoral process

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303339504575566481761790288.html

and in return are given the most rent.

“I always find it interesting how libertarians, who are supposedly all about the Sanctity of The Contract, love the notion of reneging on pension plans.”

I’m a libertarian, a contract should be between two opposing parties trying to negotiate for their best respective positions. Unfortunately when 18% of the electorate vote (as in my city yesterday), and city employees alone make up more than 1/3 of that total, the contracts for city employees are “negotiated” by a mayor, and approved by a city council, that receive significant donations from the employee unions that work for them. Kinda like how most folks on this board view Haliburton’s defense contracts from 2003. This contract is not binding on me because of the collusion between the two parties negotiating it. Just because you bought a politician to say it is legal doesn’t make it right. Public employee retirement benefits will be going down, not because of hatred of the employees, but because we can’t afford it (at least in my city).

Cheers from a Pennsylvanian. Fantastic result really.

someguy: will you go away if I tell you I think you’re speaking God’s truth? Because I do, really.

“No. The deal is you spend the most on the electoral process”

Oh yeah. It is big money from unions that is the true poison in the veins of the electoral process. Not anonymous money from corporations and plutocrats.
Moron.

Gee, I wonder what was happening to everybody’s investments in 2009-10? (By the way, the health funds are not mandated by law- only retirement- so there is not the slightest question of bailouts ever happening there.)

And yet again, 1) the taxpayers will not be asked for a penny, and 2) the various pension boards have defined what they need in terms of contribution increases (for the cops and teachers, not PERS whose members generally retire later) and retirement-age changes to get those numbers solidly to 100%- but the legislature has done nothing.

Who pays you to spread lies here, by the way?

I shall find more joy in this victory when and if those public workers understand that the attack on social security is an attack on them even if they are not in the system. I’ll have more joy when the war on the poor is seen as travesty equal to “the war on the middle class”. And I’ll be happy when everyone in our great state understands that our budget shortfalls have everything to do with the recession, the race to the bottom that governors pursue to lure businesses, and the erosion of our manufacturing base and nothing to do with medicaid or state workers’ insurance costs.
Nice defeat for Kasich, though.

kat, many of us have always gotten those things. From talking to cops I know, I’m cautiously optimistic that some of the traditionally Republican groups are starting to see the light as well, though it’s a shame that it took their own oxen being gored. But in any case this fight has built up a ground game that can be used in the progressive cause more generally. It’s OK to feel good today.

You’ve mentioned a couple times that the Ohio pension scheme for public employees is entirely employee-contribution-funded (no indirect funding, or backstopping from general revenue).

I said no such thing. I said that no additional taxpayer funds would be required for “bailouts.” As in all such plans there are “employer” and “employee” contributions but the key point is that BOTH are part of the compensation my employer and I agreed to in exchange for my work, and in Ohio are in fact defined by state law.

That didn’t come out correctly.

I wasn’t trying to make a distinction between employee and employer contributions. I’m trying to make a distinction between specified contributions and specified benefits.

Let’s try this again: what you’re saying is that there are up-front, specified amounts that the employee and the government contribute; there’s no mechanism by which the government could need to contribute more money later?

So why do public pensions exist? Wouldn’t the employees prefer to get cash and save it, free from the possibility of future generations welching? Or is the tax structure really that biased in favor of pensions?

Watson- No and yes respectively. And it’s cheaper for public employers to provide part of compensation in the form of pension benefits rather than cash. Moreover, contrary to wingnut legend, defined-benefit pensions are actually quite cost-efficient (but of course they don’t work when employers are allowed to welsh on their contributions, i.e. steal from their employees).

Understudy,

I’m a libertarian, a contract should be between two opposing parties trying to negotiate for their best respective positions. Unfortunately when 18% of the electorate vote (as in my city yesterday), and city employees alone make up more than 1/3 of that total,

I suggest you take your complaint up with the 82% who didn’t vote. As I understand it, the repeal was widely expected to be successful, so obviously the 82% didn’t oppose it strongly.

“The other fact that merits response to the troll is that those employees have already paid for those pensions, which is part of their compensation in an officially negotiated contract.”

This is only true for various definitions of ‘paid for’. If a pension is underfunded, which nearly all of the public pensions are, that means that they aren’t being properly paid for, or they are being poorly managed, or both. That doesn’t mean that the pensioners have an unlimited moral right to raising taxes as much as they want to cover the lack of earlier funding. The current dynamic appears to be–public service unions employ public choice/capture strategies to have more influence over negotiation than the average taxpayer. They favor paying later to paying now, because later their own taxes won’t be implicated, it will be some other generation’s taxes. The baby boomers favor paying less than their own fair share both in taxes while they are working, and by taking an unsustainable share in retirement when they are not working.

As usual the Baby Boomers found a great way to to screw everyone both coming and going.

Now this isn’t exclusively a union problem at all. The same game was played with the Social Security ‘deal’. The Baby Boomers engineered the ‘deal’ so that when they were in their own peak earning years they would pay lower income taxes, and when they retired they would get higher benefits than anyone else–to be paid for by taxing subsequent generations at a much higher rate when they are in their peak earning years.

The problem is that unless you have a fantastically growing economy, which it appears we can’t count on, these ‘promises’ that the Baby Boomers made to themselves with the money of future generations can’t be paid for without beggaring the future generations.

Which maybe you don’t care about.

Now removing collective bargaining rights is a stupid way to attack the problem, so I’m happy that the Ohio measure didn’t pass. But that don’t confuse that with thinking that the public pension system is going to be hunkey dorey without fucking over future generations who appear to be slated to be getting paid much less than you did while getting taxed at a much higher rate than you did.

So, the whole controversy is about the difference between state employees insurance vs Medicare, both paid by taxes? Seems petty and misguided. Of course it would be better to have one public insurance for everybody. Medicare is also underfunded; a garden variety single-payer health care system would fix it all.

Steve, taking the money and investing it might screw up the general account but it remains in the Social Security account.

Henri, there is a difference between my taxes paying for things I use and for the pay for other people. The question is why one group of beneficiaries does so well.

cian, index funds and CAPM seem to suggest that the risk of welching is now quite high. This is what made private pensions vanish: when Congress passed laws insuring pensions the costs suddenly rose to the true amount and it because much easier to just have everyone save what the company would be saving anyway. The big benefit: no one can negotiate away what you already got.

Ironically, pension plans in the private sector have also been systematically underfunded for many years. The difference is that private industries have been more or less successful at shucking their obligations and stiffing their former employees to the point where in many cases investors get all their money back before pensioners ever see one thin dime . . . despite the promises that this would never happen when the rules for pensions were changed back in the 80’s.

Now, that’s a lot harder to do for a state level government, particularly when facing a union as opposed to individual employees with no collective rights. So what happens when they try to pull the same shenanigans? Why, try to paint those union employees as ungrateful parasites and their rather modest compensation packages as bloated payoffs from a patronage political system. Of course.

Iow, the same old, same old where if the law are the facts are against you, pound the table.

just because you have a billion dollars doesn’t mean you’ll get abetter rate of interest than somebody with $100,000. … And on the whole, the bigger a fund is, the worse the return.

oh. I hadn’t really thought about how quickly diminishing returns would converge to effectively zero marginal benefit per extra worker’s contribution. Still, except for very highly compensated employees, still seems like the rate of return each pension-receiving worker experiences ought to be better than what they would get with their tiny parcel all by themselves, at least on average. The latter statement still flummoxes me; I can theoretically grasp that a billion-dollar fund could get the same rate of return as a million-dollar fund, but why would it receive a worse interest rate? I’m trying to envision a mechanism. Is it because buying so many bonds would somehow push available interest rates down instead of up, or would trigger inflation…?

State employees in Ohio are not in the Social Security system, so we take attacks on our retirement system seriously.

It’s dishonest as hell to complain about pension shortfalls in the aftermath of a market crash, by the way. And the most expensive pensions, by far, are for police and fire – because they retire early given the natures of their jobs.

Oh, and polls of the general public are generally more liberal than election results, not more liberal.

So, other than being wrong about basically everything, the conservatives here are doing just fine.

A deal was made in good faith by the unions to secure the pensions. The deal should be honored. Now the fact that the pension plans are not fully funded will likely force either bankruptcies by the municipalities or result in much higher taxes. Without this type of pain, the system will remain broken. A system in which politicians can promise increasing public union benefits without fear of any political consequences from the taxpayers who are on the hook for the bill; while at the same time stiffing the union by withholding funding from the promised benefits.

“The other fact that merits response to the troll is that those employees have already paid for those pensions, which is part of their compensation in an officially negotiated contract.”

This is only true for various definitions of ‘paid for’. If a pension is underfunded, which nearly all of the public pensions are, that means that they aren’t being properly paid for, or they are being poorly managed, or both. That doesn’t mean that the pensioners have an unlimited moral right to raising taxes as much as they want to cover the lack of earlier funding.

All right. Not “paid for” but definitely earned in accordance with the contract. The pensioners have as much moral right to insist on being paid as any other worker does to insist on being paid contract amounts for work performed in accordance with that contract. That the payer will have problems coming up with the money does not affect the right to be paid.

Still, except for very highly compensated employees, still seems like the rate of return each pension-receiving worker experiences ought to be better than what they would get with their tiny parcel all by themselves, at least on average.

This could be true I guess; probably in the current environment at least.

The latter statement still flummoxes me; I can theoretically grasp that a billion-dollar fund could get the same rate of return as a million-dollar fund, but why would it receive a worse interest rate?

I’m not sure about one that invested in bonds. My gut feeling the same probably applies, but I don’t really know.

For stocks its basically because its just harder to trade and invest successfully if you have billions, rather than millions, to invest. Trades move the market, you need to make big trades, etc. Tends to be a law of the market that over a certain size, that the bigger a fund is, the worse it performs.

Are corporations and their whores in Congress engaging in arms-length negotiations over all the subsidies and tax goodies they get? That’s a fucking hell of a lot bigger problem than the (semi-mythical) one of teachers’ unions getting friendly board members elected. The ability of those on the right to strain at gnats and swallow camels is remarkable.

*To the question of pensions in general.* I find the following numbers about the net worth of senior citizens interesting. According to census data reported here (http://www.newser.com/article/d9qs31qo0/census-shows-net-worth-of-older-americans-is-47-times-that-of-young-adults-widest-gap-ever.html), “Among the older-age [65 and up] households, the share of households worth at least $250,000 rose to 20 percent from 8 percent in 1984”.

This figure isn’t very impressive. You’d think that people who worked all their lives in this “land of opportunity” would have accumulated a bit more than a quarter million (which is about the value of a paid-off home and nothing more). But only 20% reach that category. It is clear from these numbers that only a minority of senior citizens could live off their savings, and almost all of them would soon be wiped out by health expenses if they didn’t have Medicare and Social Security or other kinds of retirement insurance.

How these data are reported and framed, however, is another matter. The headline of that article reads: *”Census shows net worth of older Americans is 47 times that of young adults, widest gap ever”*

It is hardly a coincidence that that kind of statement is thrown into the current debate about inequality and the 1%. It is obviously in the interest of the 1% to frame inequality in generational (or as is often the case educational) terms. And of course that is nonsense. The article states: “The typical U.S. household headed by a person 65 or older has a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by somebody under 35.” as if there was such a thing as a typical household. Clearly, the “typical” (as in median) senior citizen household is not rich by any means, only a small minority of them is, and quite a few of them are poor. That particular use of statistics is pretty irresponsible.

Of course older people are more likely to be rich than younger ones. More to the point, today’s younger generation is in exceptionally bad economic shape. The article states that *”37 percent of younger-age [under 35] households have a net worth of zero or less, nearly double the share in 1984″*. These numbers speak to the collapse of the middle class, not to any inter-generational conflict as implied in the media.

Could you please translate into English?

You realize that you think this is bad, right?

You realize that I said my example is 1) real, unlkie yours which is basically an urban legend (I’m sure one can find a few actual examples but they’re rare); and 2) orders of magnitude more important?

Watson, why do you suppose it is that there are teachers on the South Side who can’t add, but not in Winnetka? Really, you should go back to studying the thoughts of Chairman Bob and stop trying to deal with reality, which seems to be beyond you.

great to see push back against the lies and deception of the Elites in Ohio. one big victory, one little step. a taste of blowback .

that 400 people can control that much money means they control our society. looks like the War on America is beginning to awaken a lot of people. Good news is always welcome. lighting a fire

the least we can do is some throws wrenches into the system, screw it up so it comes crashing down. took almost 40 years to get this bad, will take time to get out.

…that was fun. I mistyped ‘bookie’ for ‘broker’ in the first sentence and had to think for awhile about whether or not to change it.

“Why are those bankers allowed to work? Why on earth do they deserve a paycheck? Fraud charges may be in order for such displays of overblown mismanagement. It seems reasonable that some degree of capture happened.”

Yes you’re absolutely right. They are parallel situations. In neither case should we be comfortable with leaving the people who have been fucking things up for the last two decades in charge without seriously changing the oversight regime. It is seriously weird that you seem to think raising it is a disagreement.

In neither case should we be comfortable with leaving the people who have been fucking things up for the last two decades in charge without seriously changing the oversight regime.

You mean, get rid of mayoral control in Chicago? I’m all for that.

Watson @78: Is it a Law of the Internet that nobody questions wild canards so long as they’re made about Detroit? No, Detroit does not have a 40% illiteracy rate.

And for anyone who thinks money has to do with the quality of teachers, I’ve got salary data (granted from a forum) which shows that isn’t the case:
http://www.city-data.com/forum/chicago-suburbs/271551-teacher-salaries.html

Salient, you aren’t the problem. The problem is the math teachers who cannot do the material they are supposed to be teaching. Boardwork errors are one thing, failing a test for eight graders quite another.

True, we need to make the school accountable to parents. The best way is to let parents decide where to send their children. Local school districts could work, if it wasn’t for the fact that not all districts are going to be faced with the same degree of parental involvement. Mayoral control could also work, if the mayor of Chicago was actually elected by those who live in Chicago. But if we go to local school districts, then we need to make sure that the school districts get the control that comes with their responsibility.

The best way is to let parents decide where to send their children.

No it really isn’t. I don’t say this because I’m opposed to it on ideological grounds, I oppose it on purely empirical grounds. In Britain we’ve had it for over ten years now, and it has been a total f**ing disaster.

Incidentally Watson, as a self-declared Marxist, why do you have such a hard on for Right wing ideas? Public choice theory, school choice, pro free-trade, privatisation of pensions. Tell me, are you familiar with the concept of false-consciousness?

Incidentally Watson, as a self-declared Marxist, why do you have such a hard on for Right wing ideas?

Perhaps Watson is a Marxist of the Living Marxism sort.

It is interesting that s/he does so often work with neoliberal tropes. Often, when I read Watson’s comments, I picture Mickey Kaus in a carefully-chosen Che t-shirt, brandishing a borrowed copy of Capital and reminding himself to say “comrade” every third or fourth sentence.

And Watson, I’m not mocking you, really. I find the phenomenon genuinely interesting. It recalls for me conversations I had hundreds of years ago, back in the usenet days, with an English Marxist who over the course of several years and without ceasing to identify as Marxist evolved into, if not an American right-winger, then at least something like an Anglo version of the Radicali Italiani.

Salient, I’m accusing the tests of not being good enough, that is not including what we expect teachers to teach. I expect that people will know calculus by 12th grade. There is no other way to get everyone to a position where they, not the school they go to, decides where to go. So what we put on the eight-grade test was basic geometry, simplifying algebraic expressions, and quadratic inequalities.

Mrs Tilton, I think a lot of it has to do with the big divide in 1924 over how to advance the revolution. Trotsky and his supporters felt that what was needed was a revolution that like the capitalist one would realize no boundaries, and make it possible to overcome class divisions. The Stalinists decided for worldwide nationalism. In that sense one strand of communism inherited the idea that individuals should be empowered by society to decide how to live, while another felt that society should create an adequate form of life for everyone. The two are not the same.

I might add since Salient didn’t fit to mention it: as almost everyone here already knows, you don’t “simplify” quadratic expressions. The best you can do is factor them. Now, you might be able to simplify a rational expression, and that rational expression may contain quadratics (or not). But that’s something else entirely. Something that Watson, who “made up this test” didn’t know . . .

cian, the test covered a good deal of math, but 10 of the problems were doing basic arithmetic where basic means simplifying expressions with addition, multiplication, division, and subtraction. Of those 10 problems a significant fraction of teachers failed to get a majority correct. I’m sorry about my mistyping: I don’t have a copy of the test, but I did grade a bunch of them.

The test existed. Your accusations to the contrary are false, despite my admittedly poor descriptions of it.

Salient, the question is about teaching math, not what Illinois thinks math is. We’re veering very far from the path here, but I think it likely that the involvement of educators in the standards bodies is to the detriment of what comes out. I learned math primarily sitting in a room doing problems for 8 hours a weekend. This certainly doesn’t work for everyone. But I think everyone should be able to learn mathematics to that level, and that requires teachers who can support students who are doing significantly more than the standards require.

SoV, I really don’t give a damn about the terminology for elementary operations. I don’t think about it, I just do it. No matter how complicated, one should be able to grind down to a simple form correctly and automatically to do math. And these teachers could not.

We’re veering very far from the path here

It has been a very long time since I actually stopped reading a comment addressed to me while only partway through, but at this point I have my own health to think of. Your original claims were, “in the South Side of Chicago we have math teachers who can’t add. In Detroit 40% of all adults cannot read.” Both claims were transparent BS. Expect no further engagement from me. All the best to you.