Disaster of Detroit: Others speak out
If you work in the public sector and haven’t been paying attention to what’s happening in Detroit don’t expect any sympathy when the pension killers come for the money you’ve saved for retirement.
The following are some observations by mayors, professors and others about what Detroit means for the rest of the country.
“It’s a turning point. … What has been sacred — pensions — are not sacred anymore,” said Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner.
“While municipal bankruptcy has never happened in New York, it is clearly not beyond the realm of possibility,” according to Peter Baynes of the New York Conference of Mayors. He said the state must help more because the problem bleeds beyond city lines.
“This was a ruling that should send chills through every working American,” said Stephen Madarasz of the Civil Service Employees Association union, which represents 265,000 members. “It really suggests that any semblance of the social compact is dead.”
“This should remind them of what Hugh Carey was reminding city workers 40 years ago,” said E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank. “That all bets are off.”
Most Americans think public employee pensions are reasonable and many think that with an average between $18,000 and $30,000 annually they’re actually on the low side.
Good luck getting anyone to acknowledge that though when the headlines focus largely on the relatively few cases where pensioners are getting a six-figure deal.
For instance, from Long Island Newsday:
“Long Islanders dominate the list of non-teacher public employees in New York State who retired with six-figure pensions in 2011 and 2012, making up just over 50 percent of the total, according to state records.
Of the 426 retirees who received $100,000 pensions statewide during that time, Nassau had 121 and Suffolk had 93- most of them police officers.”
Those kinds of stories are always going to be more popular than “Retired Detroit cops to live on $3,000 per year.”