Billionaire mayor thinks your pension is too generous
Multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg, took his last opportunity as mayor of New York City to repeat the propaganda and lies that it is the pension and health care costs for cops, firefighters, teachers and nurses that pose the gravest threat to the city’s budget.
In a speech to the Economic Club of New York during his two weeks in office, delivered to the city’s top corporate and financial titans, Bloomberg made a disturbing effort to pit the city’s educators and public safety employees against the poor when he stated that pension and health care costs were “forcing government into a fiscal straight jacket that severely limits its ability to provide an effective social safety net.”
Bloomberg’s recommendation to slash pensions and health care benefits comes at a time when stock prices and executive compensation are reaching record highs.
These are tactics similar to ones now being employed in Detroit where federal, state, and local governments are systematically attacking workers’ benefits earned under contractual agreement while at the same time slashing social services.
The attack on public employee benefits has been given a powerful boost by the recent voiding by a federal judge of legal protections for public employee pensions. Other municipal and state governments across the United States are taking this as a green light for drastic reductions in public worker benefits.
Stephanie Miner, the Democratic mayor of Syracuse, the fifth-largest city in New York State, is quoted as proclaiming, “Pensions are not sacred anymore.”
Despite the recent rebound of the financial industry, fueled by virtually limitless funds from the Federal Reserve, the fundamental weakness of the real economy, combined with massive tax reductions on businesses and the wealthy, has meant that the budgetary situation for county and municipal governments has only gotten worse.
There are approximately 2 million public employees and retirees across New York State. Contrary to allegations that public pensions are overly generous, the average annual payment to state employee retirees is $20,241, almost at the poverty level.
In New York City, contracts for the entire municipal workforce of 300,000 have been expired for up to four years. In 2010, Mayor Bloomberg vowed not to sign any new contracts unless they contained “benefit reforms. Unions decided to wait it out hoping their members would get a better deal under a new Democratic mayor.
As a result, city workers, living in the nation’s most expensive city, haven’t had any pay increases in years, after Bloomberg froze wages following the 2008 financial crisis.