Quote:
Originally Posted by northcrunk
I agree with Locke that the biggest spending issue is public sector pensions. They need to be fixed and crawled back to an extent. We are paying out the ### for a lot of people who don't provide value anymore and seem to be living longer lives.
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Okay, well yes and no.
The pensions as they are structured right now are unsustainable and pretty much everyone knows it but its been passed around like a political hand grenade, which is understandable.
Now, I'm not advocating that we slash, burn and destroy public pensions entirely, that isnt feasible either economically, socially or politically, but they have to be scaled back.
That would be a little extreme even for Commissar Notley of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Alberta. We dont want retirees waiting in lines for bread, vodka and toilet paper.
However, it is widely understood that paying people to not work for you is economically unfeasible. The Edmonton Oilers and Vancouver Canucks havent figured this out yet but the odd manufacturing conglomerate and the Automotive companies in between regularly scheduled insolvencies eventually managed to put that little piece of economic theory to a few fairly resoundingly successful tests.
And before I'm challenged with the 'oh yeah, but those businesses got Government bailouts!!"
So does the public sector. Every year. Every time they run a deficit and the Government just pays the tab.
When they receive an operating budget and a huge swath of that budget goes into a non-operating expense (pensions) that is effectively paying 'debt.'
The thing is, at the moment, Public Service Pensions are the biggest and among the most successful Ponzi schemes around.
Where Ponzi schemes normally fail is when they reach critical mass and they just cant get scam any more suckers out of their money, unfortunately in this instance the suckers are built into the structure of the scheme in the form of Alberta Tax-Payers in general. And our barriers for exit for walking away are very high.
Now again, to be clear, we arent talking a 'fall of the Soviet Union' type of clearing out of pension accounts and throwing our pensioners out into the streets. Those pensions are still important but they have to be based on economic reality.
And finally, this isnt an 'Us vs. Them.' 'Public vs. Private!'
This isnt a game and we arent on separate teams, we all live here together, we have to to do this together. Public service employees arent useless drunken morons like Springfield's Naval Reserves, they operate essential services and deserve respect but those pensions are just way outside of any kind of economic reality.