How's This for a Plan?

[maxx]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/op...me&ref=general
"...One of the best of this new breed of leaders is Atlanta’s inspiring mayor, 41-year-old Kasim Reed. A former Georgia state senator, Reed won Atlanta’s mayoral race in December 2009 by 714 votes. The day he took office, Atlanta had $7.4 million in reserves, an out-of-control budget and was laying off so many firefighters there were only three personnel on a truck, below national standards. A year later, it has $58 million in reserves, and Reed has a 70 percent approval rating — which he earned the hard way...
Then Reed tackled the city’s biggest problem: runaway pensions, which were eating up 20 percent of tax revenues and are rising. In the early 2000s, the police, fire and municipal workers’ unions persuaded the city to raise all their pensions — and make it retroactive. So, between 2001 and 2009, Atlanta’s unfunded pension obligations grew from $321 million to $1.484 billion. Yikes.
Reed couldn’t cut existing pensions without lawsuits, but he cut back pensions for all new employees to pre-2000 levels and raised the vesting period to 15 years from 10. When union picketers swarmed city hall to protest, Reed invited them all into his office — in shifts — where he patiently explained, with charts, that without pension reform everyone’s pensions would go bust.

By getting the city’s budget under control, Reed then had some money to invest in more police officers and, what he wanted most, to reopen the 16 recreation centers and swimming pools in the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, which had been shuttered for lack of money. “People were shooting dice in the empty pools,” he said. Local businesses have now offered to finance after-school job-skills programs in the reopened centers. Cut here. Invest there.."

[ja!mz]

great plan, but would never happen here without someone getting shot be before they could look at charts

[ja!mz]

^ ^^^^^^^^^^

[Detroitnerd]

Nobody left to steal from but the public employees. If we can break those unions, then perhaps over the next few years the incomes of the super rich can soar some more. The bad news? Meh, it's just a little more pain for us all to bear as wages get depressed even further. But what's the matter with you? Money isn't for you. Money is for the rich. We all need to tighten our belts and do our part to protect corporate profits and executive bonuses. Get back to work!

[Novine]

Despite all the pension board screw-ups, Detroit's pensions are nowhere near the drain on the budget that Atlanta's was reported to be.

As for Mr. Friedman, you have to love getting a lecture about the need for "hard choices" and "taking the hit" from a guy who married into the family that manage to take a billion dollar real estate portfolio and run it into bankruptcy.

[kraig]

One of the historical problems that any political leader in Michigan is going to have to deal with is that whoever they're requesting to take a hit has already taken one several times over. At some point, the leadership has to deliver the goods in order to have the credibility to ask people to take another hit.