Retiring People Early as a Budget Solution? Are You Crazy?

Today's Providence Journal headline states that the police union's solution to laying off 60-80 police officers is to "incentivize" early retirements. Are they nuts?

When are the unions, municipalities, and school committees  realize that having someone retire early is not a savings, but an additional expenditure? There is only one pot of money in Rhode Island. It is the taxes we taxpayers pay. If you decrease the city of Providence' budget for police by paying officers to retire early YOU INCREASE THE PENSION DEFICIT!! And all the taxpayers will pay for that. That is one of the big reasons why the state has a 9.3 billion dollar deficit in the pension funds.

A few years after I graduated  high school, Providence "saved" money by retiring many teachers early with extra money as incentives. These were some of the best and the brightest and experienced teachers  at Classical High School. It must have taken years to recover the loss of institutional knowledge. Losing good teachers  was bad enough, but those teachers (many still alive after 30 years), collected pensions with colas for more years than they taught! That's savings?  It cost millions, saved nothing other than a few dollars in the short term. The people whose idea it was are retired to Florida by now.

During this year's Barrington School Committee budget discussions, a member once again brought up the idea of retiring teachers early to help close the difference between what the administration needed and what appropriations felt the town could afford. Our elected officials must be made to understand that while it may give them short-term relief, it saddles us, the public, with long-term liabilities that cannot be met.

The only idea that is worse that is floating around  is to take the debt and motorize it over 20 or 30 years. Oh boy!  That way current retirees can still collect and we can pay $27 billion more in interest!! Anyone who suggests that idea as a solution should be branded an enemy of the state  (Robert Walsh, president of the teachers union advocates that, I believe. Perhaps he has picked out his place in Florida already).

It is time for us all to look at what these things cost us. Not only now but also what it will cost tomorrow and in the future.

You would think that the pension crisis on every TV show and the front page of the news, even the national news, would serve as a wakeup call, but union leadership try to pull the same old trick.