A Reader's Comment On My AFSCME & Pensions Post

My recent post concerning government employee and related unions and their inflated pensions drew a record number of visitors in the past few days. Thanks to the post being linked and/or copied on several other websites, there were 772 direct visits yesterday, with an unknown additional number of readers viewing the post by email or pasted copies on the other sites.

One reader left a comment that merits being reproduced here, for direct rebuttal. It's typical of the sort of rant one hears from uninformed, narrow-minded union members who tend to reject reality and view the situation through the lens of their own denials. The capitalization has been left as it appeared in the reader's original comment.

"AHEM...TRY GETTING YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT ABOUT THE MAJORITY OF IL. PENSIONERS AND the il pension sytem......know what you're talking about...

HERE'S THE TRUTH....... JUST DON'T BLAME THE ILLINOIS BUDGET CRISES ON THE PENSIONERS...OR THE PENSION SYSTEM...!

Debunking Illinois Pension Myths!.

Myth: Illinois has too many public employees.

Reality: Illinois actually ranks 49th among the states, next to last in the nation, in number of state employees per capita.Historically, Illinois has not been a high public employee head count state. Instead, Illinois is mostly a grant making state– that is, rather than hire state employees to provide services; Illinois disburses grants to independent providers such asLutheran Social Services or Catholic Charities, which in turn deliver the service to the public

Myth: Public employee benefits are too generous.

Reality: For most Illinois public employees, their pension is all they receive upon retirement – fully 78% are notcovered by and do not receive Social Security. This is unlike workers in the private sector, who receive both SocialSecurity and private retirement benefits.

4. Myth: Illinois’ current defined benefit system is too expensive.

Reality: The ‘normal cost’ of a pension system is the contribution required from an employer to fund the plan’s benefits.The weighted average ‘normal cost’ across all five Illinois pension systems, as a percentage of active members’ payroll,averages 9.13 percent. The national average for state and local government is 12.5 percent, placing the normal cost ofIllinois’ current defined benefit program far below the national average.IL PENSION SYSTEM BENEFITS ARE ONLY ABOUT 49TH AS GOOD AS OTHER STATE PENSIONSSTATE HAS A NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES FAR FAR BELOW OTHER STATESPENSIONS ARE ONLY 18K A YEAR AVERAGE AND BECAUSE OF PENSION SYSTEM RULES... 78 % HAVE NO SOCIAL SECURITY EITHER....!y

J. Allaman, "

M. Allaman makes a number of errors of logic.

First, simply to allege that because a group of people don't qualify for Social Security says nothing about their other pension arrangements.

Neither does the number of a state's employees deal with the richness of their pensions, or the timeframe within which such pensions may be vested and become payable.

Without knowledge of the full distribution of pension costs, as a percentage of active governmental employee costs, we can't know whether any single state is "FAR BELOW" the costs of mean or median cost of state or local employee pensions.

Of course, discussing only costs of pension systems avoids, as you would expect, the discussion of the tax base available to service said pensions. The reader omits any comparison of Illinois' ability to actually pay its AFSCME- and related union employees. This, however, would seem to be of great import.

States with fewer resources would seem to be less able to afford rich public employee pensions.

Finally, merely referencing a mean point of a distribution of mostly poorly-managed states proves nothing.

I would venture to guess that the majority of readers of this blog who reside in the US are unhappy with their state governments, as well as the federal government.

To cite statistics of a group of mismanaged states hardly justifies lush pensions for public employees, especially when most of the private sector long ago moved to defined-contribution plans.