Finally, someone realized that Scott Walker's "budget repair bill" incorporates a huge error (aside from the entire union-busting, middle class destroying aspect) in the heart of it. Walker's bill requires that public employees begin to contribute 50% of their annual pension funds, and his spin on the budget crisis has been that the overprivileged state employees, with their unearned and unwarranted benefits, have contributed heavily to the problem.
Only problem is, the state employees already contribute 100% of their annual pension funds. Yes, that is correct. A full 100% of a state employees pension contribution comes from that employees' earnings. As was finally pointed out in an article by Pulitzer Prize winning tax journalist David Cay Johnston and discussed by a Forbes blogger, Rick Ungar,
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.
This is a huge oversight, both on the part of Walker, the unions who are battling Walker's bill, and the news media and bloggers (myself included) who missed this. Walker's ulterior motive behind large parts of this bill was to portray public employees, and unionized workers in general, as sucking hard-earned money from real "taxpayers'" (read, non-unionized middle and lower class workers) in order to support their cushy jobs and lazy ways. Any information he could provide that advanced that notion is to his advantage, whether it is correct or not.
But for the unions, it is a significant oversight that they need to pounce on and loudly decry. I have repeatedly heard Tea Party members and other conservatives bashing the public employees for their pensions, and we must immediately clarify that in fact, those pensions are paid for by the employees themselves, and thus have not contributed in any way to the budget crisis in Wisconsin.
And as for the media, it is inexcusable (again, I am including myself here) to have taken anything that Scott Walker says as correct, based in reality, or truthful. We should know better.