What Non-Liberals Dislike About Liberalism (restored)

I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole of the pension issue, but the pension issue is a good example of something non-liberals consider a negative about liberalism that is more complicated than it appears. And in this case, there are some problems with this issue on both sides. (Please note, it’s pretty rare for me to state a “both sides” argument but it’s true in this particular case.)

On the one hand, there are significant issues with pensions in many states, particularly those negotiated more than 10 to 20 years ago, when awareness of the problems arose. The pensions negotiated in the 60s, 70s, 80s and early 90s often had numerous loopholes and exploits that caused the ultimate pension liabilities to be far higher than projected. That was combined with pension funding by local and state entities that relied upon optimistic-on-cocaine stock projections (we don’t need to fund these pensions very much b/c the stock market will solve all our problems!!). The result was that by 10 to 20 years ago, the long term projections for many public employee pension systems was looking really bad, with public employees receiving pensions much higher than private employees and with taxpayers projected to end up holding the bag. The response to this was pension reform in many states, plugging loopholes, using more reasonable accounting projections for funding, etc. This was a real problem but also a manageable problem, in most cities and states. However, some cities or states that had falling population or weak economic growth were in a real bind. This was the reality at the core of this issue; but then the right wing media machine has taken this legitimate but manageable issue and turned it into ZOMG!! PUBLIC EMPLOYEES ARE LIVING THE HIGH LIFE AND BANKRUPTING CITIES AND STATES OH NOES!!"

There’s a real issue here, and the culprits are not just public employees exploiting loopholes to max out pensions like mad, but also the public entities that failed to fund and implement the pensions in a reasonable way, projecting MAGIC GROWTH!! as the solution.

The real long term solution here is to establish reasonable sustainable pension systems, properly funded using reliable and honest economic projections. The vast majority of cities and states have done this going forward.

That does leave a huge “retroactive” issue which is what to do about the pensions which were accrued under the old laws and which in most states give the employees the contractual right to collect higher benefits. A lot of Republicans and many voters seem to be under the impression that we can just “tighten our belts” and cut these pensions but it’s not that easy legally speaking.

Most pensions are considered legally binding contracts in most states and in some states (like CA) pensions are considered deferred compensation which is a property right accrued during employment and paid later. For example, in CA, the higher pensions from the loophole-a-gonza days are considered vested property rights already earned by the retirees and the CA Constitution prevents the state from breaking those contracts. If the state tried to pay less, the retirees could go to court and get an order forcing the state to pay.

So the only solution to address the retro issue is either to bite the bullet and properly fund those under-funded over-paying pensions (which means tax increases now) or to negotiate with the retirees some kind of reduction. But what can the states and cities offer the retirees as consideration for reducing a big chunk of their income? The goodness of their hearts? The pride of being an awesome citizen? Would you take a 30% or 40% cut in income just to be able to claim you are a good citizen? In some cases, some of the worst loophole exploiters are receiving about triple the pension they would have post-loophole-closure so those people would be looking at 65% to 70% reductions in their retirement incomes? How are you going to convince them to trade that off? Calling them filthy leeches isn’t going to help.

It’s a real problem but it’s way more complicated than stated by right wing talk radio or left wing types who think “oh we should have just fully funded them back then”. It’s too late to unbreak the egg, and it’s also smoking dope to think the pensioners are just going to voluntarily give up a third or half their pensions or more so either big spending cuts elsewhere or tax increases are the only solution.

Yup because you take one part of what I said, want to try & prove it wrong and presto you’re right.

Nope, I’m not engaging you Scott. You don’t live in Oregon and if you want to try & tackle something, take the first example I gave - the 99%'rs.

I think that ship has sailed.

I have to live in Oregon to know that ‘she didn’t focus on PERS’ is a poor way to communicate ‘I didn’t like her proposed solution for PERS’?

If the point of that example is that not every one of tens of millions of people agree on the same things, what’s the point again?

I think in many instances recently hired employees are not being given the same retirement package earlier employees received. I think it is unfair to promise something and then years later, when the employee may have budgeted for it, try to take it away.

And I don’t like blaming the employee, although in some cases maybe you could blame the shortsightedness of a union at the same time you blame the public entity that made the deal.

I do think it is crazy that there are public employee pensions that pay more than the employee made while working. You see this with public safety jobs and with government management employees.

I get that, but keep in mind, for the same level of education and experience, public employees usually are paid significantly less than their counter parts in the private industry.

Although with the recent stagnation in earnings, that might be less and less true. It seems employees, as always, get screwed, while the rich grow richer.

I think it depends upon what agency in what state you work for. I know a few people who have worked for state agencies and they do very well and have good pension plans. I have known an assistant county sheriff who made good money and whose retirement was better than his base pay when he retired. But yea, if you are a clerk in city hall you probably aren’t getting rich.

One of the interesting about the pension issue is that for most CA public employees, if the pensions were fully funded using reasonable accounting projections and with various loopholes and exploits closed, then the value of the pension contribution plus the public salary would be roughly equivalent to private industry pay. In other words, when the pensions are done right, the total compensation is what you would expect.

The problem is twofold: first, for several decades the pensions were not done right and even now most public entities are using overly optimistic economic projections. Second, this real but not catastrophic problem (in most areas) has been exaggerated by right wing media into ZOMG BANKRUPTCY!!!

But is in an interesting example of how the real world is far complicated than partisan perceptions would make it seem.

Take it off the baby boomers taxes. They are the ones who failed to fund it in the first place.


The only part of that I find hard to believe is someone paying that little for an apartment in San Francisco.

My Aunt had a place in Redwood City. Good location. Average house, built in the 50’s and not all that big. She died a couple years ago and we finally got around to selling her house, after renting it out for $4k a month for the last two years.

We asked $1.5m for the house, the top “bid” was $1.65 with a 21 day escrow.

Hipsters?

Oh, wait…

Poor Boo.

Evil doers beware!

Hamsters aren’t vegan

Finally dawned on me what I don’t like about liberals (despite being liberal myself.)
It’s related to @Tman’s observation in a way:
Lack of pragmatism (good is enemy of the perfect) but more impactfully, a lack of ability to stick with an agenda. Republicans have wanted to dismantle the New Deal since its inception (and, really, any progressive legislation since.) This has taken them decades to achieve, sometimes chipping away at the margins, but since 2010 has since gone into overdrive (thanks in large part to gerrymandering and their hold on the Supreme Court.)

In all that time, they have never debated on what they can do to broaden their appeal to the other side. Yet even now, in the face of a minority party’s death grip on the government both state and federal, it’s still a topic debated among Democrats. Instead of developing long term goals to build the party core, or energize and motivate young voters (along with Hispanics and African Americans), they wring their hands over (the myth of) “the white working class.”

I know this sounds at odds with lack of pragmatism, but both can be done. For example, 2010 happened in part because a sizable chunk of left wingers sat out to “punish” Democrats for not including a single payer option in ACA. Well, how’d that turn out?

There’s the famous joke that a liberal will never take his/her own side in an argument, and there is a lot of truth to that. That said, the actual policy which emerged from the New Deal - and to a lesser extent, the Great Society - remain broadly popular. It’s true that the main goal of the Republican Party is to dismantle those programs, but they campaign by lying about that goal, rather than explicitly campaigning on the goal, and for some reason the electorate believes what they say rather than what they actually do.

So liberals should never seek compromise with them when it comes to those programs, because to compromise with them is to validate their agenda. This was why Obama’s grand bargain-seeking was a mistake; not because he didn’t understand that they wouldn’t make a deal with him, but because he should never have wanted them to.

Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are easily funded with adequate levels of taxation, and those levels are not ruinous as we can see from the fact that every other developed country in the world thrives with them. Indeed, with European levels of taxation and proper regulation of medical care, we’d have universal care for all.

Yes, this sort of thing is spectacularly stupid. There’s also the old saying that Democrats fall in love (with a candidate or position) while Republicans fall in line. Republican voters are much more pragmatic about pulling the lever for their party despite the fact that they’re often too stupid to realize that they are voting against their own interests.

Do you have data that shows this? Turnout among many Democratic constituencies was actually higher in 2010 than in 2006. And while it was lower overall than 2006, it wasn’t unusually low for recent mid-term elections. (Higher than 1998, 1994 and 2014, about the same as 2002.) 2006 was just an energetic year for Democratic voters. And 2010 was an extremely energetic year for Republican voters. The 2010 wave was caused far more by Republican engagement than by Democratic apathy. If you scroll down to the end of that last link, you’ll see that anti-incumbent sentiment among Democrats was not particularly high in 2010. In fact, it was significantly higher in 2014.

I remember reading about it back then. No data per se but news articles:

Sacha Baron Cohen’s SJW character is spot on

https://twitter.com/drniracain

“I’m a cisgender white heterosexual male, for which I apologize.” lol