The New York Times editorializes on our state's fiscal crisis, with some recommendations that surprise me. This famously liberal newspaper criticizes state employees' overly generous wage, pension and health benefits won by strong unions exerting heavy political pressure on our legislators.
At a time when public school students are being forced into ever more crowded classrooms, and poor families will lose state medical benefits, New York State is paying 10 times more for state employees’ pensions than it did just a decade ago.That huge increase is largely because of Albany’s outsized generosity to the state’s powerful employees’ unions in the early years of the last decade, made worse when the recession pushed down pension fund earnings, forcing the state to make up the difference.Although taxpayers are on the hook for the recession’s costs, most state employees pay only 3 percent of their salaries to their pensions, half the level of most state employees elsewhere. Their health insurance payments are about half those in the private sector....To point out these alarming facts is not to be anti- union, or anti-worker....Here are the three most expensive areas of spending that need to be addressed:
