Quote:
Originally Posted by basschick
in california people currently working for the state are getting pay cuts and unpaid furlow days regularly, but there are a large number of people getting pensions from the state over $100,000 a year who got no cuts at all. i read this in an article that also mentioned there's a guy collecting i think it was a $250,000 annual pension who was actually indicted for all sorts of corruption while in office, and i think some of it was proved.
maybe what each level of government REALLY needs is a department of common sense...
|
I don't know whether it's more necessary to have a department of common sense or a department of ethics. The issue with the pensions is, usually, a matter of ethics. A pension is a contract. The employee has already provided the work, now you are ethically bound to provide the pension-whether the employee still needs it or not. (I won't address the employee who was indicted for corruption-if the pension 'contract' was properly written then that employee will lose his/her pension once he/she is convicted. If he/she is convicted of corruption then he/she probably didn't do the 'work' the pension is supposed to pay for-so he/she violated the contract first, relieving the state of the ethical obligation to continue paying the pension. There are many, many, variations on this, e.g. if the corruption was for only a portion of the time he/she was employed & he/she still qualifies when considering only the time not 'being corrupt' then should he/she lose the entire pension? Like I said, too many variations for me so I won't further address that issue.)
I'm not actually an expert at ethics (as far as I know there is no such thing) but I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about them. Consider the recent problem with the government providing bailout money to firms who were paying executives million-dollar bonuses. In most cases these bonuses were part of the employment contract so if the firm didn't pay them then the employees could seize their property (after obtaining a court judgement that they'd violated the contract, of course-but that wouldn't have been too hard to get). Probably property (including bank accounts) worth far more than the amount of the bonuses. The ethical failures in these cases were two: the boards that first approved these contracts and the politicians and/or bureaucrats who approved the bailout funds without checking whether or not such contracts existed.
This conflicts, of course, with my desire to see such decisions put to a vote of the people-I've never found the US population, as a whole, to be very ethical. Individual people, yes, but the population as a whole? Not really-that's one of the reasons we keep electing corrupt politicians.