Call It A Comeback
For their quick updating of their site which led me to think there were no challenges to Stufflebeam’s candidacy.
/snark
Stufflebeam does have a challenge to his petitions and given he only collected 34,000 signatures it’s pretty unlikely he’ll be on the fall ballot.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D74omWYgv00[/youtube]
The staggering level of ignorance about public employee pensions never ceases to amaze me. Josh writes the post I’ve been trying to get to for some time, though I think I’ve mentioned the issue previously:
I did some calling around on this issue yesterday and got much the same impression. What Brady seems to have overlooked is that the state’s teachers — who make up about 80 percent of the government workforce — don’t get Social Security. That means the state doesn’t have to pay the 6.2 percent federal payroll tax on these workers. If new employyes were instead offered a 401K, the state would have to start paying that tax and there’s reason to believe that this would actually be more expensive than the current pension system. Add to that the administrative costs of managing two retirement programs and … you get the picture.
Chalk it up as just the latest evidence that Brady doesn’t understand the ramifications of his own policy prescriptions.
In the effort to demonize public employees, Brady and those like him don’t seem to understand the basic math surrounding getting rid of public employee pensions and largely this is the fault of the press which can’t deal with this complicated of an issue well and just hears the constant fretting over how the state will make its pension payments. The problem isn’t with outsized pensions, it’s with a state government that has relied on gimmicks to balance its budget and pensions have always been an easy target to divert. That’s not the fault of public employees, it’s the fault of politicians not making hard decisions.
IRS Agent Shari Schindler just testified that Rod and Patti Blagojevich spent $400,000 in clothing expenses between 2002 and 2008. Of that, $207,000 was spent Oxxford Clothes, a luxury clothier that Rod fancied. Thousands more were spent at Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Geneva Custom Shirts.
Below are the Blagojevich’s top 10 categories of expenditures from Jan. 2002- Dec. 2008:
1. Medical
2. Travel
3. Childcare
4. Retail Stores
5. Private School
6. Groceries
7. House Expenses
8. Rental Property Expenses (a condo in Chicago and a condo in Washington, DC)
9. Home Mortgage Payments
10. Clothing
ArchPundit