-By Frank Hyland
It is difficult to look anywhere these days without encountering news coverage of the battle going on in New Jersey between public employee unions and the State of New Jersey. The tussle, at least trying to put it politely, is a rerun of last winter’s gathering of public employees in Wisconsin. Both of them, in turn, are “First Cousins” to the street riots in Greece, Spain, and the UK, among a growing number of other locales around the globe.
The New Jersey brouhaha centers on what public employee unions claim is an effort to balance the state budget by unfairly increasing the amounts and percentages that their members must contribute to health and pension plans. A Fraternal Order of Police spokesperson is quoted as saying that the State of New Jersey created the deficit but public employees are being asked…..required to fix it.
If for some reason you have a consuming interest in the details of the situation, you can easily find an abundant supply of specific amounts, percentages, and related statistics. My aim in this column is to raise a different point, one that I’ve not seen covered anywhere else. If a public employee in New Jersey, or anywhere else for that matter, is told that after a certain date they will contribute a higher amount to health and or pension benefit plans, a howl of protest ensues immediately. Crowds carrying signs and banners show up outside state capital buildings, sometimes indoors as well. The protests, led by persons with bullhorns, become very vocal. In some cases the protests turn violent and result in intervention by police officers – pitting public employees against other public employees.
It has taken a while for the question to form, but it is one worth asking of all those who are protesting changes in health and pension benefit plans. Someone unfamiliar with such plans, and watching the protests on TV, could quickly form the impression that money is being taken from the public employees and being given away to others in…..maybe Zimbabwe or Indonesia. The truth is that, in effect, public employees, like those in the private sector, are simply being told that they must “save” more. A Teacher or Firefighter who puts more money into their pension fund gets more back when they retire…..in some cases much more than they would have received had the amount not changed. To continue on the present course, I’m sure you’ve seen and heard, is simply not sustainable. In other words, governments will go broke in the near future and no public employees will receive any pension payments or health benefits. Think not? A number of municipalities have already laid off their entire Police Force in order to balance their budgets. Others have declared complete bankruptcy, folded their tents and been annexed. For public employees to complain that they are being told that they must put more into their pension plans means, in effect, that they are complaining that they will have more money when they retire. Make sense to you? I may be one of the very few people to whom this question has occurred, and I’m sure that public employee unions do not want this question being posed publicly. Too late…..
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Frank Hyland is a long-time Writer/Editor who has written for The New Media Alliance, and also for The Reality Check and has appeared weekly on Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Conservatism on Sunday evenings on Blog Talk Radio, along with Babe Huggett and Warner Todd Huston.