Time To Change the Frame

Every teacher - every public worker - pays 100% of the costs of their benefits.

Simple. The pension plan is the direct result of deferred compensation- money that employees would have been paid as cash salary but choose, instead, to have placed in the state operated pension fund where the money can be professionally invested (at a lower cost of management) for the future.

Many of us are familiar with the concept of deferred compensation from reading about the latest multi-million dollar deal with some professional athlete. As a means of allowing their ball club to have enough money to operate, lowering their own tax obligations and for other benefits, ball players often defer payment of  money they are to be paid to a later date. In the meantime, that money is invested for the ball player’s benefit and then paid over at the time and in the manner agreed to in the contract between the parties.

Does anyone believe that, in the case of the ball player, the deferred money belongs to the club owner rather than the ball player? Is the owner simply providing this money to the athlete as some sort of gift? Of course not. The money is salary to be paid to the ball player, deferred for receipt at a later date.

It is time to hammer this point home again and again and again: "benefits" are not gifts, they are compensation. When you "ask for employees to contribute more to their benefits," you are really demanding pay cuts - period.

Chris Christie and Scott Walker want to severely cut teacher pay, even while they give huge tax gifts for businesses and the wealthy. There is no other honest way to say this.