tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1797875972831999598.post2554068369053740771..comments2023-11-22T04:27:07.521-06:00Comments on glen brown: “How We Got to the Pension Crisis” via Liars and Thieves gbrownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13435049339082622611noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1797875972831999598.post-19387686599802720172013-10-23T08:54:10.763-05:002013-10-23T08:54:10.763-05:00Douglas L. Greenfield and Susan G. Lahne (2012) fo...Douglas L. Greenfield and Susan G. Lahne (2012) found that “the vast majority of state courts, relying on either state law or the Contract Clause of the U.S. Constitution, treat pensions provided to public employees as enforceable contracts protected from later unilateral reduction, even if imposed through legislative enactments (p. 2) (See E. Madiar, Public Pension Benefits Under Siege: Does State Law Facilitate or Block Recent Efforts to Cut the Pension Benefits of Public Servants?, ABA Journal of Labor & Employment Law, V. 27, no. 2 179, 181-185 (2012) (summarizing and categorizing state courts’ varying treatments of public pensions).<br /><br />“It is reasonable to conclude that government employers desire and intend to treat their complex, articulated pension programs in toto [in entirety] as an important aspect of their contractual obligations to each of their employees covered under the program (p. 11-12) (See Madiar, ABA Journal of Labor & Employment Law at 194, n. 111 (citing Lauderdale v. Eugene Water & Elec. Bd., 177 P.3d 13, 19-21 (Or. Ct. App. 2008)). <br /><br />“Pension plans, unlike other forms of compensation, are designed as complex systems intended to be funded consistently over time and to produce life-long replacement income to be provided over time to employees after retirement. Stability is an important facet of all pension plans, and this is particularly true of government pension programs, which tend to be larger, more long-term, and more complex in terms and scope than private-sector plans (p. 12)…<br /><br />(A footnote referring to the aforementioned states,] “In this regard, the reduction of the governments’ promises, as part of these employment agreements, to maintain these long-term, complex funding and payment programs, to promises of ‘deferred compensation,’ (see Monahan, 97 Iowa L. Rev. at 1043), understates the actual nature of the states’ substantial undertaking. The state courts have obviously understood that more than merely future compensation payments are involved in the commitment that governments took on as enforceable contractual pension obligations (p. 12)…<br /><br />“If the courts had initially mistaken the legislative intent underlying these pension programs, and governments had not intended that they create binding contractual rights, governmental entities surely would instead have taken concrete steps, all these many decades, to correct the courts’ errors and to establish that they intended to have the freedom to revise such arrangements at will, as well as to ensure that newly-hired employees understood the precariousness of the current pension arrangements (p. 13)…<br /><br />“[However, it is true any] attempt to denigrate the validity of decades of judicial precedents about the binding nature of legislation establishing pension commitments to government employees and to motivate state courts to overturn long-settled premises about these commitments would impose its own, unjustifiable costs. The states and their instrumentalities have promised pension benefits to their employees; those employees have relied on those long-standing promises; and as a result the citizens of the states have benefited from the services provided by those employees. <br /><br />“[In short,] there is no sound public policy reason to conclude that these promises – based on the reasonable expectations of the contracting parties – should not be fully protected by the laws prohibiting or limiting the impairment of contracts” (p. 15-16). <br /><br />Greenfield, Douglas L., Lahne, Susan G. (2012). How Much Can States Change Existing Retirement Policy? In Defense of State Judicial Decisions Protecting Public Employees’ Pensions. National Council of State Legislatures Legislative Summit, 1-16. Retrieved December 9, 2012 from http://www.ncsl.org/documents/fiscal/DGreenfield_Presentation.pdf<br />gbrownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13435049339082622611noreply@blogger.com