JayB

Counterscamming a Nigerian Con Artist. http://www.419eater.com/html/okorie.htm

Before you ask Bill about that, how about you regale us with a reprise of the detrimental health effects associated with the intentional contamination of municipal water supplies with sodium fluorosilicate. "Google flouridation and you'll come up with a bunch of websites outlining the many adverse health affects of flouridation, and the lack of evidence that it helps prevent tooth decay. Personally, I prefer to take responsibility for my own chemical injestion and health rather than trust government, thank you very much." http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/632340/1 Ha. Ha.

http://www.gadling.com/2011/03/02/largest-mall-in-the-world-is-a-chinese-ghost-town/

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What hogwash! Let's seriously cut the war budget, take back the various corporate welfare that isn't doing anything worthwhile for the greater whole, effectively tax (because tax rates tell us nothing of actual taxation) corporations and the wealthy (in particular make war on tax heavens and close loopholes), and invest in the economy. Then, we'll see what we can afford to do or not, but not before we do all of it. I guess that pretty sums up the difference between Jim and me. The Federal government won't be riding to the rescue. Political economy won't allow that unless it goes to all states, which would never fly in Congress or the bond market. Any state or local official who sticks his head in the sand and waits for a Federal bailout will wind up inflicting even more pain on both the public employees and the constituents who elected them by allowing the deficits to expand while they delay the inevitable restructuring.

Which fund of taxpayer's money was used to issue trillions in cheap loans to the banskters so they could keep going with outrageous compensations? Oh, sOrry, I forget that corporate welfare doesn't really register with you despite your posturing to the contrary. Jim's point, which bears repeating, is that even if - for the sake of argument - you accept every one of your claims, that does absolutely nothing to close the gap between what state and local governments are obliged to pay and what they have the actual resources to cover. If repeating the above ad nauseum would make the assets necessary to fund public sector pension and retiree healthcare benefits, then the people running those systems would have done so. It won't. It can't. The end.

j_b is losing one argument so he changes the subject again... and adds some more lame left-wing verbiage to boot. Priceless. My next post will be about organic vegetables. ... Best to avoid asking whether or not they're stored in root cellars, IMO...

Public pensions are funded by employee contributions, employer contributions, earnings, and transfers from the general fund to cover shortfalls. Employer contributions, and transfers from the general fund to cover shortfalls = taxpayer money. Employee contributions and earnings = not taxpayer money. If public employee unions could be paid out with the contribution of employee contributions + earnings, there'd be no issue. They can't. Not by a long shot - which is why they'd go berzerk if someone proposed that their pension benefits be limited to those that could be financed by their contributions plus their earnings. Bear in mind that it takes $20-30,000 to cover every thousand dollars in inflation indexed pension benefits. Significantly more if you have a retiree significantly below the age of 65. That means it takes between $1,000,000 and $1,500,000 to fund a $50,000 pension. That doesn't even consider health benefits, which are typically funded out of general revenues, with no money set aside to pay for them. Assuming that the pension is for 60% of the final year's pay, that means someone with a final three year's salary of ~$83K would get $50,000 per year. Play with the calculator I've linked below and see what kind of annual contributions and return rates it takes to get that kind of cash. Then ask yourself how likely it is that someone who retired at 83K could have ever made anything like the kind of annual contributions required to accrue that kind of balance. They haven't been. They won't be. It is going to take massive amounts of tax money to cover the difference. http://www.dinkytown.net/java/InvestmentReturn.html

http://www.thegatesnotes.com/TED/Speakers-Topics/Bill-Gates/Infographic-State-Budgets-Pension-Healthcare

"Gates Says Benefits Costs Hit Schools Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates will step into the national debate over state budgets Thursday with a call for states to rethink their health care and pension systems, which he says stifle funding for public schools...." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704728004576176802077647470.html

Both the public and public employee unions would have been much better off if the state had transfered this liability to private companies that the state had to send a check to every year. Then the politicians would have had to make promises that they could actually keep, and fund them - on the books - every year. Far too late for that now. The future is now in Costa Mesa

If the purpose of the building is to withstand aerial bombardment, then yes. Pensions/annuities are supposed to be designed to provide a specific payout despite the inherent volatility and unpredictability of asset prices over time.

http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/publication/Getting%20an%20Accurate%20Picture%20of%20State%20Pension%20Liablilities.Norcross.12.13.10_0.pdf

Wow. Awesome. Thanks for sharing the stoke.

Basing your pension funding liabilities on the assumption that markets will never crash - this is supposed to be a serious analysis? Would anyone take a structural engineer seriously if they said something like "If it hadn't been for the earthquake this building would still be standing.." An easy way to get the true measure of the magnitude of the funding shortfall would be to find a company that manages annuities in the private sector and asking them how much it'd cost to get them to assume the public sector pension liabilities for a given state or local government. Given that they'd have to base that figure on what the total contributions plus their earnings would be worth relative to the payouts over time using the same methods that private sector pension plans do - we'd be able to get a very clear picture of how much taxpayers are going to have to cough up to make up the difference. The number would be massive. That's not even counting the cost of public retiree health benefits, the vast majority of which are completely unfunded and will have to be covered by the general fund.

Private 401(K) balances aren't backed by guarantees that the public is obliged to fund with tax revenues in the event of a shortfall. Public employee pension shortfalls are. Those shortfalls are staggering, even with the completely bogus discount rate that public entities are using to calculate the magnitude of the unfunded liabilities that will completely annhihilate the budget for every other public priority and, in the ultimate irony - eventually manifest in the massive layoffs that unionized public sector workers seem to prefer to cuts in pay and benefits. "Costa Mesa to lay off nearly half of city workforce, outsource services The city of Costa Mesa plans to lay off more than 200 employees and outsource 18 city services by the fall. The layoffs would cut the city's municipal workforce by 43%. The City Council approved the layoffs in a 4-1 vote late Tuesday night, despite nearly unanimous opposition from the audience. City officials said pink slips will go out in the next six months. The mayor blamed years of missteps by city staff and rising pension costs. "This has been coming on for a long time, and we're coming to a point that's rock bottom," Mayor Gary Monahan told the crowd of mostly city employees." http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/03/costa-mesa-to-lay-off-nearly-half-of-city-workforce-outsource-services.html Look for this to continue until either the taxpayers insist on maximizing cost efficiency in the public sector, or the bond market does the same.

"I am a pension actuary, working with private plans, but the issues are similar. To determine the present value of pension liabilities, you need to discount the expected future cash flows of the pension plan. The cash flows are based on the plan provisions, the participant data and assumptions about future events (e.g., mortality, salary increases, retirement rates). Actuaries traditionally used the expected rate of return on the plan's assets (reflecting the asset mix). As noted above, people like Jeremy Gold have argued, based on financial economics, that the determination of the present value should not be based on expected returns, but on the discount rates for similar investments, such as high-quality corporate bonds. The IRS funding rules that apply to private plans and the corresponding accounting standards accept this view. Current discount rates on these bases are roughly 5.5%-6%, which if applied to public plans, would raise the liabilities significantly, and unfunded liabilities. What is the right answer? Clearly, the expectation for those invested in equities is a return higher than those on corporate bonds. The price is increased volatility in contributions and funding status. As some have commented a perverse effect of good returns has been the granting of additional benefits to union members (that happened in NJ around the time of the 2000 crash). In any case, if the standards that apply to private plans were applied to public plans, the funding situation would be much worse than people like Baker are claiming. And that is without considering the post retirement health benefits that are also offered, which have large present values and which are not backed by assets - they are totally unfunded." All that and more here: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/03/how-bad-is-the-state-pension-funding-mess.html#comments

What's the connection between collective bargaining and the first amendment? Unions just had their free speech rights validated by the Supreme court in the Citizens United decision, so their right to political speech is more broadly protected than ever. Other than that - they're free to withhold their labor and employers are free to withhold employment, no?

If there was ever a weekend to drop everything and ski, this was it. So. Much. Powder. I had the time of my life, but one of the highlights was watching my wife start to get the hang of powder skiing on her first massive powder day. My evil plot to get her addicted to the same kind of fine white powder I've been hooked on all of my life seems to have born fruit.

Worth contrasting with the latest from Euroland. I could care less about John Galliano but the fact that you can literally be charged and arrested for insulting a particular race/creed/religion in Euroland and pretty much every other chunk of territory on the planet makes me quite glad to live where I do.

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"The showdown in Wisconsin over fringe benefits for public employees boils down to one number: 74.2. That's how many cents the public pays Milwaukee public-school teachers and other employees for retirement and health benefits for every dollar they receive in salary. The corresponding rate for employees of private firms is 24.3 cents. Gov. Scott Walker's proposal would bring public-employee benefits closer in line with those of workers in the private sector. And to prevent benefits from reaching sky-high levels in the future, he wants to restrict collective-bargaining rights. The average Milwaukee public-school teacher salary is $56,500, but with benefits the total package is $100,005, according to the manager of financial planning for Milwaukee public schools. When I showed these figures to a friend, she asked me a simple question: "How can fringe benefits be nearly as much as salary?" The answers can be found by unpacking the numbers in the district's budget for this fiscal year.... ....Overall, the school district's contributions to health insurance for employees and retirees total about 50.9 cents on top of every dollar paid in wages. Together with pension and Social Security contributions, plus a few small items, one can see how the total cost of fringe benefits reaches 74.2%." WSJ Link Doubt this is terribly different from every other public sector compensation package in the ratio of benefits to wages/salary...

That decision hasn't been made yet. The grant calls for the Mountaineers to donate the original films to the UW where they will be properly cared for. The grant further calls for the digitization of selected films (we don't have enough money for all of them at this point) and the creation of online finding aids. By default, I believe that UW would normally post short clips, as I've done. And they probably would not put as much time into editing the clips as I have done. I'm not a professional archivist. But in my efforts as an amateur it has seemed to me that there is a tension between raising awareness of historical materials and "giving away the farm." Preserving these materials takes time, effort, and money. How does an archival organization continue these efforts if they give everything away? Either you need well organized fund-raising efforts (with memberships and donations, etc) or you need a system of usage fees to recover the cost of your preservation work. Or you need volunteers who can do high quality work for free. None of these is easy. So, I don't know whether the whole films will be available online. Like everybody else, the UW is scraping for money these days. So are the Mountaineers. What is the best approach to enable these organizations to continue their preservation work? Thanks for your efforts on this and your other projects. Just to toss a few ideas out there... http://www.kickstarter.com/ Passing the virtual hat here at CC.com, TAY.com, etc with a Paypal based donation link and possibly listing donors probably wouldn't raise a whole lot of money but might raise a few dollars here and there. Kind of a long shot, but there might be people out there interested in commissioning the archiving/digital conversion of a particular film. Might be easier with a standard rate per minute of film so anyone interested in doing so would have a reasonable idea of how much it would cost to do so. Would this kind of project be eligible for REI's charitable slush-fund, etc?

Say Union Yes!