pensions

About a month ago I wrote about pensions and how the benefits are determined and how easy it is to manipulate calculations to get a desired result. In the news yesterday is the latest gimmick that states like Illinois plan to use to help their budgets. They say that all new hires will have to accept lower pension benefits so they can reduce the amount of money they must put into the plan today and thus have those funds available to pay for current benefits like salaries. Recall that when determining current contributions to pension you must consider benefits that may not pay out for many years. This way they can keep the pension promises they made to current employees and reduce benefits only to new hires and of course this is easy to enact and they can worry about new hires in the future. Can’t you just see this future situation where I was hired a year before the change and you and I are now retiring you with 39 years of service and me with 40 years and my pension is $25,000 and yours is $20,000. That might cause some controversy but that is a long way off and someone else problem.

It has been the history of pensions that problems were pushed on down the road for the next guy to handle and this case is no exception.



My brother lives near New Orleans and I asked for his thoughts on the oil spill and here is his response.





Slidell is about 40 miles north of New Orleans no problems yet. Thank for asking.



Now thisoil spill is BP's fault for sure, but I fault the administration (obama) slow response turning down help from the Dutch and other who are very experienced in these matters, they offered skimmer boats and other aid 3 days after the explosion and was turned down because of the Jones act (Unions). I believe that 90 to 95% would been captured.



This is a political BS Tto try to get cap and tax. They also need to investigate the governmnet agencies who's it is to over see and insepct these rigs.



obama is putting 1000's of people out of work out of work the moritorium on oil drilling and wants BP to pay for is agenda for people out of work and cap and tax.



If they had been allowed to drill in shallower water like Gov Jindal authorized they would not have had this problem.

Mike