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Public unions’ stealthy scheme will siphon $100B from NY taxpayers

Imagine one of your children or grandchildren — perhaps still too young to be messing around online — innocently opens up an email.

“Don’t you care about our heroic public workers? Don’t you love teachers? Don’t you want fairness? Click here!”

Kids don’t know any better. They tap the link.

In an instant, schemers wire $20,000 out of your family’s savings account — gone forever.

You’ve been warned, New York, because this is basically what will happen in Albany this month — only it’s not your kids being duped, it’s your state lawmakers.

New York’s public employee unions want Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state Legislature to retroactively change public pension rules that have been on the books for over a decade.

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Unlike some other states, these pensions are paid on top of, not instead of, Social Security benefits.

It’s unfair, the unions say, that workers hired since 2012 must pay more toward their New York taxpayer-guaranteed, state-tax-exempt pensions than people hired before.

In fact, many union leaders say their members shouldn’t have to pay anything toward their pensions.

And it’s a matter of “equity” and “dignity,” they say, for teachers and office workers at state agencies to be able to retire with full pensions (plus taxpayer-funded retiree health insurance) at age 55.

The unions want to “fix” these supposed injustices.

Defined-benefit pensions are increasingly rare outside the public sector: Only 14% of private-sector employees had access to one last year, down from 20% in 2010 — and these weren’t taxpayer-guaranteed, like New York’s.

Facts aside, the unions plan to pressure Albany this coming weekend by busing thousands of their members there for a rally.

There will be chants.

There will be speeches about “fairness.”

What won’t there be? An actual piece of legislation.

That’s because the unions’ demands are so extreme that they have, shrewdly, avoided having their allies in the Legislature file a bill containing their demands — because that would trigger an actuarial score, and put a price tag on it.

Instead, they want Hochul to tuck it into the budget and stealth-pass it quickly, before taxpayers hear about it.

That’s what the unions did in a test-run of this exercise two years ago, when they got Hochul to sign off on a seemingly tiny, technical change on how to calculate pension benefits — which ended up costing taxpayers over $4 billion over the long run.

Property taxes rose as a result.

This time, back of the envelope, the unions are looking for about $100 billion — or $20,000 for every Empire State family.

The unions point enviously to the pre-2012 rules, but they don’t provide the complete history.

The cost to taxpayers of New York’s public-employee pension system, documented by my colleague E.J. McMahon, ballooned from $1 billion in 2000 to $10 billion in 2010, causing eye-watering jumps in property taxes.

Unrealistic expectations about pension-fund returns, combined with longer lifespans and generous public-sector pay, caused a fiscal monsoon to hit New York state and local governments.

Even after two rounds of reforms in 2009 and 2012, pension costs still kept rising: They didn’t peak until 2015, by which time they were 15 times what they’d been in 2000.

The reforms that arrested those exploding costs — namely, having public employees pay up to 6% of their salary toward their pensions — are what’s on the chopping block right now.

Don’t forget, New York state’s Constitution guarantees these pensions, so once they’re sweetened, there’s no undoing it.

It’s easy to bellyache here about the unions, but they’re just political organizations doing what their members want.

The bigger problem is New York’s elected officials, who parrot the unions’ demands without challenging their most specious claims.

When the job market got unprecedentedly tight in 2021, for instance, the unions took to bizarrely blaming the 2012 pension reforms, rather than the effects of a world-upending pandemic.

They never produced a shred of evidence,  just kept insisting that New York’s storied public-sector benefits weren’t generous enough to recruit public workers.

It’s a remarkable claim, given that their members signed up for the very benefits union leaders now say were inadequate.

But lawmakers are unwilling to challenge them, and taxpayers pay the price.

Your homework assignment tonight, New Yorkers: Ask your state senator and Assembly member whether they’re going along with this plot — and if so, what it’s going to cost.

Extra credit if you ask one of Albany’s Republicans, who are supposedly fighting to prevent these sorts of abuses.

Your family has $20,000 riding on this.

All it will take is one ill-considered click of the unions’ email.

Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

new york state assembly

new york state senate

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