Posted on February 2, 2012
By Frank Keegan | State Budget Solutions Every year state politicians loot the pensions of more than 17 million public workers and retirees to "balance" budgets, yet those workers keep putting the looters back into office while fighting the few who try to head off this $4-trillion national economic catastrophe. A look at the latest U.S. Census [...]
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Posted on January 11, 2012
By Patrick B. McGuigan OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. — Right to work is in the news again. Under the leadership of Gov. Mitch Daniels, Indiana is about to enact reform despite Democrat legislators’ efforts to block it by boycotting the House. They may have blocked approval late this week, but party leaders admit the bill will [...]
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Posted on January 6, 2012
By Girard Miller One of my pet peeves in the ongoing debates over public pension reform is the way partisans on each side try to pitch half-truths and myths to support their arguments. The other side seldom believes any of these, but they help rally the allies on the speaker's side. Sometimes the press naively [...]
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Posted on December 30, 2011
By Frank Keegan Here is a New Year’s resolution every American private sector worker must keep no matter what: Write a check for $14,150 Jan. 1 to make up for state and municipal pension shortfalls. Prepare to write one every year for 30 years. This is on top of all other taxes and fees governments [...]
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Posted on December 15, 2011
By Frank Keegan Why would politicians and union bosses oppose new rules encouraging better disclosure of our public pension crisis when actually those rules barely scratch the surface? Because even a little honesty is too much for them. They will have to confess they deceive taxpayers, bond buyers and public workers about accounting tricks that [...]
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Posted on December 8, 2011
By Frank Keegan — Virginia’s top legislative fiscal adviser recommends a traditional solution to the $50 billion state pension catastrophe: Lie, cheat and continue to deceive public workers and taxpayers. Politicians have been betraying them for decades anyway. So maybe Old Dominion residents should give a little credit to House Appropriations Committee Director Robert Vaughn [...]
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Posted on December 4, 2011
By Paul Soutar — President Barack Obama will deliver a speech on the national economy at Osawatomie High School, next to John Brown Memorial Park, at 1 p.m. Tuesday. The venue is puzzling unless you understand a speech there on Aug. 31, 1910, by former President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s address called for a “New Nationalism” [...]
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Posted on November 30, 2011
United States citizens may see a light breaking on the horizon of government accountability. The White House released a Memorandum on open records management for U.S. Government agencies, calling for a revamped, modernized, “more efficient and cost effective” system for agency records. The Executive Branch hub states that the changes will “improve performance and promote openness and [...]
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Posted on November 23, 2011
By Frank J. Keegan – Well Pilgrims, when we sit down to feast this Thanksgiving Day pray for God to suppress the insatiable appetite of governments, because their fiscal gluttony now surely will inflict future disease on us all. Right now fiscal gluttons at the public trough not only gorge at the expense of future [...]
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Posted on November 18, 2011
By Frank Keegan — Here is how NOT to reform public pensions that threaten to drag states and municipalities into an abyss of perpetual debt: Give cronies millions of dollars in benefits that will come directly out of taxpayers’ pockets, because there is no money invested to pay them. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie talks [...]
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