“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
— Henry Ford, American Businessman (1863-1947)
We are moving through an era where the status quo must be questioned and all tax-payer-funded-expenses must be subject to rigorous review. This article on the overlap, extra costs and potential waste of individual public pension plans is worth consideration:
“You know them by their handles: HOOPP, OMERS, OPB, OP Trust, and Teachers. These five defined benefit pension plans make up the bulk of the pension assets for public sector workers in Ontario. Which means that the Ontario taxpayer is on the hook for each when the markets fail to produce sufficient capital growth and income to meet the contractually promised benefits. With $338 billion of collective investment assets at the start of the 2011 fiscal year, there is a lot a taxpayer risk when the market wanes.
Each of the five plans has its own unique qualities and history. HOOPP is known to be a plan filled with younger workers in the medical field, while the Teachers is a more “mature” vehicle of teachers who often live to 90 or 100 years of age or more. If you live in London, Ontario and work for the public sector on the Provinical side, these are the five entities that the government set-up years ago to serve your needs.
But you’ve got to ask yourself: why a London firefighter, a London teacher, a local OPP officer, a local MTC employee and a nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital might all be served by different pension plan managers with seemingly different strategies and risk tolerance levels? That can’t be the most efficient way to manage scarce financial resources in wild stock and credit markets, particularly when the same taxpayer winds up funding the shortfall if things don’t go as hoped. Which has been the case for at least the past three years.”
See the whole article: Does Ontario really need five pension plans?
A must read article from David Frum on the devolution of his beloved republican party from a legitimate political philosophy to a party of conflicted dogma rather than thinkers:
“I’ve been a Republican all my adult life. I have worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, at Forbes magazine, at the Manhattan and American Enterprise Institutes, as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration. I believe in free markets, low taxes, reasonable regulation, and limited government. I voted for John McCain in 2008, and I have strongly criticized the major policy decisions of the Obama administration. But as I contemplate my party and my movement in 2011, I see things I simply cannot support…
Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know canny investors, erudite authors sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him and yet that is done too.
Conservatives have been driven to these fevered anxieties as much by their own trauma as by external events. In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump. Along the way, the GOP suffered two severe election defeats in 2006 and 2008. Imagine yourself a rank-and-file Republican in 2009: If you have not lost your job or your home, your savings have been sliced and your children cannot find work. Your retirement prospects have dimmed. Most of all, your neighbors blame you for all that has gone wrong in the country. There’s one thing you know for sure: None of this is your fault! And when the new president fails to deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone’s accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage, what relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief.
…It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.”
See: When did the GOP lose touch with reality? (hat tip Andrew)
