8/22/05
BILLION-DOLLAR TEACHER
PENSION SHORTFALL A REAL POSSIBILITY
Did you catch, in
Sunday's paper, that if you added the $750 million projected shortfall in the state
teachers' pension fund to the $191 million shortfall projected for Omaha Public
Schools retirees, that is getting uncomfortably close to a BILLION dollars? If
the market goes south, we taxpayers are going to have to come up with a big
chunk of that to cover our pension promises to our state's public-school
employees.
Ewwww!!!
Funny how the union
lobbyists were soaking people's hankies all across the state a few years ago
about the "starvation wages" we pay teachers here in Nebraska. Yeah, right.
Then they got the "Rule of 85," the nation's sweetest teacher-retirement deal.
They did it under the leadership of longtime union activist Joe Higgins, now a
member of the State Board of Education for the south Omaha area. He really
should be pinned with this big shortfall now, and lead us out of the quagmire
with pension reform, and stat.
Hint, hint: we need to
admit that defined benefit plans are just too expensive. We need to move to
defined contribution plans. That's another way to gain a little breathing room
to pay beginning teachers a little more, and pay teachers a little better earlier
in their careers. You can tell that older teachers, nearing retirement, put
this compensation package into place out of self-interest. It's just not much
of an inducement to a 22-year-old to get into a teaching career and stick with
it because – wow! – when you're old and gray, you'll have dough.
Not that it's wrong or
bad to have a generous early retirement program in Nebraska. Teachers can
retire early, at age 55, with full pension benefits, with 30 years of teaching
service (55 + 30 = 85 and hence the name, "Rule of 85"). To get that done, they
not only chopped five years off the retirement age, they got cost-of-living
protection to boot, which helped swell the numbers of the shortfall even more.
The instant the union
got that sweetheart deal, they shut up about teacher salaries, for the most
part. And now we know why.
