Despite what conservatives say, the safety net works—which is why the 1 percent wants to stage a hostile takeover.
By
Edwin Lyngar
Through a quirk in state term limits combined with a terrible midterm election, the Nevada legislature has been taken over by
amateurs and extremists. The legislature is now debating whether to dismantle the
Nevada public employee pension system (PERS), a system that has gotten consistently high marks for transparency, responsibility and stewardship.
This
attack on retirement benefits follows a very familiar pattern of
fabricating data to destroy retirements that work and that people really
like. It’s the same nonsense and lies used to destroy private pensions
two decades ago, but this time it’s being done as part of a partisan wet
dream of “limited government.” It’s a strategy as American as fast food
and crumbling infrastructure.
This latest skirmish in the
retirement wars perpetuates the biggest lie ever foisted on America—that
we cannot afford retirement benefits.
Private pensions have
indeed been systematically destroyed in recent decades, and replaced by
“defined contribution” 401k plans. The conventional wisdom is that
pensions are “too expensive,” but this is the heart of the lie. A great
many private pensions were once
over-funded, but a change in
law allowed companies to “invest” the “excess” funding in other parts of
their business. Once businessmen could legally raid the pension fund,
the idea of private pensions was over. Many books have been written
about the great pension theft. I recommend, for one, reading “
Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers.“ Spoiler alert: you will feel rage.
I’m
no bystander in all this, because I’m a member of the Nevada pension
system through my day job. Even when I considered myself a Republican, I
supported the pension system, just as my conservative friends and
colleagues still do. But a lot has changed in a few years. Public
pensions used to have bipartisan support, but the dysfunction and
extremism that has turned Washington D.C .into a shit-show has spread to
states like mine.
The attacks on benefits are always underhanded
and dishonest, an effort to keep critics quiet, and this latest attempt
is no exception, because it only targets
future members of the
pension system. It’s the same tactic used in the constant assault on
Social Security — just take it from people who don’t have it yet. My
favorite visual is the conservative who collects Social Security month
after month (after month after month) then votes for politicians who
will destroy those very modest benefits for his children — all while
reciting the false narrative of “not saddling” those same children with
debt.
A better idea (rather than stealing from our own children)
would be to pay the reasonable levels of taxes necessary to fund the
programs we all use. But “family values” conservatives are always
delighted to burn the crops and salt the earth behind them, children be
damned.
It’s understandable that people without pensions resent
those who still have them. It’s much easier to rage about a
schoolteacher’s pension than it is to understand the systemic greed of
high finance, and that’s by design. The rich and powerful who looted
private pensions have managed to set the members of the middle class
upon one another. At the same time, the purveyors of 401k plans get rich
off of fees from individual accounts. Millions of people are shuffled
into the market to be preyed upon by the vultures of high finance, who
get paid no matter how much money you win or lose in the grand casino.
I
admit that there are reasonable criticisms of pensions. There are
always a few people, an overpaid manager or administrator perhaps, who
manage to game the system through overtime pay or inflated salaries.
Critics can point to the handful of people with six-figure pensions with
understandable fury, but to extrapolate it to everyone is plain
hogwash. In my own pension system, the average monthly benefit for
regular retirees is around
2,200 a month, and retirees are
not eligible for Social Security.
For
those who think pensions should all be abolished, I’d draw your
attention to the constant attacks on Social Security. “Serious” right wing presidential candidates, and even some Democrats, have
proposed upping the retirement age, cutting benefits and in general
making life a little less pleasant for retirees. The hope is that many
of us will die before we can collect what we’ve earned through decades
of work. Even though the “trust fund” has a balance of trillions of
dollars, the money has been
used to fund everyday government spending. Politicians would rather loot your retirement rather than fund government spending with honest taxation.
I’m
not even saying that we have to sacrifice other spending priorities to
fund retirements, because there’s enough wealth in this country to do
both.
But the very question of affordability is moot, because the
attack on retirement has nothing at all to do with money. The real goal
of conservatives is to break government, so that Wall Street and the
well-connected can feast upon the carcass, gorging themselves on
ill-conceived privatization schemes. America has become epitome of a
failing company, and politicians are acting as the investment banker,
breaking what’s left into pieces to sell off for quick cash.
As a
member of Generation X, I’ve spent my adult life riding waves of
bubbles, watching housing values implode, retirement accounts halved and
job prospects evaporate. With each subsequent crisis, I and my cohort
are asked to “give up a little more” to help the country “recover,” even
as a tiny fraction of people and corporations reach unprecedented,
unimaginable levels of wealth. This disparity is unsustainable.
I can
almost
sympathize with the Tea Party, a group built on similar feelings of
frustration and anger.
Their only mistake is that they do not see who is
really picking their pockets. It’s not immigrants, “the gays” or
liberals. Tea Partiers have tragically bought into the total nonsense
that “poor people” are somehow responsible for the malaise of the middle
class. It would be almost amusing if it weren’t so tragic. Today’s Tea
Party voter is willing to sell out the future of his own child, because
he can’t see through bullshit shouted at him by Fox News every day.
We cannot afford pensions or health care or food stamps, but, by god, we can afford $1.5 trillion for a plane that doesn’t fly.
Like
so many workers, I’ve watched my benefits erode year after year, with
frozen salaries, forced unpaid days off and ever more stingy medical
benefits. I take heart that the latest attempt to destroy the pension
system seems doomed, if only because it will
cost more money to wreck it than to leave it alone. But the greater war on pensions and
Social Security is not over.
Libertarians and conservatives will not rest until they have unmade the last century of progress and the
entire
New Deal. They will destroy and dismantle, vilify and divide, because
it’s easier to make people resent one another than to make society
better. They want to not only halt progress, but to turn back the hands
of time. It’s not just pensions, but overtime pay, weekends and the
forty-hour workweek that are all in danger. It’s an act of
self-destruction and stupidity. They drill holes in a leaky boat in
which we are all riding, somehow unaware that when the boat sinks, they
will also drown.
