Manhattan Institute's Steve Malanga: 'Our Elected Representatives Played Chicken With Pension Funds'

You can thank your elected officials at the state and local level for making a mess of the public pension system, says Steve Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

"Around the country, state and local officials have increasingly discovered over the years that they can exploit the complex and sometimes ill-defined accounting of government pension systems, as well as loopholes in their own laws governing those pensions," he writes in the Washington Examiner.
"Over time, elected officials came to promise workers politically popular new benefits without setting aside the money to pay for them, declared 'holidays' from contributions into pension systems and changed their own accounting systems midstream to make the systems seem better funded — all just ways of passing obligations on to future taxpayers."

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Laws and rulings that make it difficult to reform pensions have contributed to fiscal meltdowns in places such as Detroit and Stockton, California. 

The ugly results have now become apparent.

"Our elected representatives played a deceptive game of chicken with pension funds. And now the chickens have come home to roost," Malanga says. 

America's states and municipalities face a $1.5 trillion pension shortfall, and possibly $4 trillion if the funds' investment returns don't match expectations, he explains.

"In places with the deepest debt, taxpayers face rising taxes and declining services, which is hardly the sort of place that a family or a business wants to call home," he says.

For example, he said that places that cannot reform pensions, or where legislators were slow to act, are inevitably seeing tax increases to finance steep obligations. 

Via: Newsmax

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Lying about Lies President Obama is now dishonestly defending his dishonest assertions.

The cancellations will affect only a small number of people, those who buy individual policies.

In making this claim, the president focuses on the individual market, which he accurately notes covers about 5 percent of Americans. Still, that is about 14 to 15 million people. So far, as of mid November, roughly 4.8 million individual insurance plans have been canceled, with most estimates suggesting that as many as 10 million will eventually lose their current coverage.

But the same conditions that are causing the cancellation of individual policies will eventually result in thecancellation of millions of employment-based policies as well. The only reason that hasn’t happened yet is that the employer mandate was postponed for a year, so employer plans don’t yet have to be ACA-compliant. But they will. Even the Congressional Budget Office estimates that as many as 20 million workers will lose their current employer-sponsored plans. Combine that with those losing individual plans, and more than 30 million Americans cannot keep their current insurance.

It could be far more. As Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute points out, some 51 percent of the employer-based insurance market will lose grandfathered status and need to make changes to comply with Obamacare provisions. That could mean that, in total, as many as 93 million will lose their insurance. That’s not exactly “a few.”

The policies being canceled are “substandard,” offering few if any real benefits.

Via: NRO

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Why Does Obama's White House Pay Women Less?

Equity: The president touts equal pay for equal work but hasn't practiced what he preaches with the women he has employed — including a well-known staffer who complained of a hostile work environment.

It remains a mystery as to why equal pay for women was one of the questions elected by unofficial Team Obama debate coach Candy Crowley of CNN during the second presidential debate.

But it let President Obama launch into breathtaking hypocrisy regarding the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Lilly Ledbetter, which in Crowley's view ranked right up there with BenghaziGate as a pivotal issue, woke up one morning complaining that her male counterparts were getting paid more money for the same work and decided to sue for redress of this perceived grievance.

After she was told she had missed the statutory deadline, her case made it to the Supreme Court, which said too bad, but you missed the deadline.

So Congress passed the Fair Pay Act, which does more for lawyers than it does for women, merely extending the statute of limitations for pay-discrimination lawsuits from 180 days from the violation to 180 days after the last paycheck issued that was affected by that discrimination.

When Katherine Fenton asked Obama what he intended to do about "women making only 72% of what their male counterparts earn," the question was based on a false premise and a false statistic — one calculated by Diana Furchtgott-Roth, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, by comparing all male with all female workers, regardless of experience, productivity, number of hours put in or length of service.

When you factor these things in, Furchtgott-Roth says, women make about 95 cents to a man's dollar, which may explain why, since the Ledbetter Act was passed in January 2009, only 35 women have filed lawsuits under the new law.

Via: IBD

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