This morning blogged about Senate Republican Leader Dennis Hollingsworth launching a government pension reform website — you can scroll further down the blog to read more on that.
I wanted to draw the attention of FR readers to Hollingsworth’s weekly radio address on the subject of needed pension reform. You can listen to it here, and read the transcript below.
TRANSCRIPT
You know your family or your business is in serious trouble when your debt is growing faster than your income. Unless you fix the problem, sooner or later you’ll go broke. California’s public employee retirement system is in this fix.
Runaway pensions now cost taxpayers over three billion dollars every year. Worse yet, government is short about half-a-trillion dollars needed to pay pensions in the future.
We can stop this runaway gravy train by making government pensions more like private industry retirement plans. Changes would affect only new state workers.
We need to:
- Require state employees to work longer to qualify for full benefits.
- Stop gimmicks that spike pensions.
- And require state employees to contribute more toward their own retirement.
These reforms can save over a hundred-ten billion dollars in the next thirty years. Without these changes, we’ll be asked to pay higher taxes or lose vital programs.
Fixing this problem will take time, so we must act now and adopt meaningful pension reform.
I’m Senate Republican Leader Dennis Hollingsworth, and thanks for listening.