Employee-Lite Government Is The Future
Some Johnnys-Come-Lately are warning about a pension bomb, but they’re way behind the times. Pension spending already exploded. For example, pension spending at Los Angeles Unified School District already quadrupled over the last decade.
But the Johnnys-Come-Lately are right that pension spending is going to worsen. That’s because LAUSD’s unfunded pension liabilities doubled over the last decade even as spending spending quadrupled. One sad consequence is that every LAUSD teacher today is sacrificing $10,000 per year in extra salary because more than half of the district’s pension contributions are going to service pension debt. You can’t blame the teachers for striking.
It didn’t have to be this way but, because of compounding and legal protections for retirees, it’s too late to fix the problem. In my view, California will have to move towards employee-lite government services. In schools that will mean fewer teachers and more AI.
Meanwhile, legislators in Sacramento are working hard to . . . worsen the pension explosion! A bill has been re-introduced to lower the retirement ages for police and firefighters. The bill is bipartisan — it’s not just Democrats who are under the thumbs of rent-seekers who make their living off of government spending. GFC stopped the bill last year but we can’t continue to fight these bills alone, so we’re hoping others will get into the ring. There’s no solution to rent-seeker control of California’s government until more people get into the ring.
