PEORIA -- At last, the truth about the attack on pensions in Illinois and the US has been documented. Here it is in an piece by David Sirota in Salon.
"It’s a straightforward conservative formula: the right blames state and municipal budget problems exclusively on public employees’ retirement benefits, often underfunding those public pensions for years. The money raided from those pension funds is then used to enact expensive tax cuts and corporate welfare programs.
After years of robbing those pension funds to pay for such giveaways, a crisis inevitably hits, and workers’ pension benefits are blamed — and then slashed. Meanwhile, the massive tax cuts and corporate subsidies are preserved, because we are led to believe they had nothing to do with the crisis.
Ultimately, the extra monies taken from retirees are then often plowed into even more tax cuts and more corporate subsidies.We’ve seen this trick in states all over America lately."
How sad that Illinois Democrats have fallen for this scam. They'll pay a price at the next election!
-- Elaine Hopkins
Update: The national writers are finally looking at the pension controversy. This is Richard Wolff on Democracy Now:
"... the rest of the United States is looking at this, because there
are so many other cities in Detroit's situation, that if the courts
decide that it is legal to take away the pension that has been promised
to and paid for by these workers, if it's legal to take it away, you
have theft. Call it whatever you want, you're taking away the wealth. It
is class war. It is redistributing income from the bottom to the top..."
And this, Fred Klonsky's pension issues page. See the July 24 entry.
"Fallen for?" As if they were just naïve doofuses who didn't know better? Please, they willingly made their beds and are now laying in them quite comfortably.
As far as paying for it at election time, are you planning to vote 3rd party and encourage everyone you know to do the same? If not, they won't pay a thing.
Posted by: D | July 25, 2013 at 03:12 PM