Skelton's "pension envy"

John Seiler:

It’s a bad Freudian connotation to an fraudulent Freudian doctrine, but here’s what L.A. Times’ Columnist for Tax Raising George “Not Red” Skelton wrote today: “Pressured by politicians and a private sector with pension envy, four public employee unions last week reached agreement with the Schwarzenegger administration on some retirement rollbacks for future hires.”

Get that, my fellow Californians? If you want to keep some of your tax money and not see more of  it wasted on the spiked, Lucullan pensions of government retirees, then you suffer from “pension envy.”

Actually, and I think I speak for most Californians, I don’t care how much they get in pensions — even if it’s $1 million a year each. Just so I don’t have to pay for it!

The retirees are the ones who go their unions to push for pension spiking during 1999-2000, the height of the dot-com boom, when it seemed like stock-market gains would never end. So, they should take the hit when the market crashed.

Instead, because of a ripoff clause in the California Constitution — which increasingly resembles the old Soviet Constitution — all of us are forced to make up for the retired government workers’ losses. Even as our own 401(k)s and other investments crash with the rest of the economy.

Here’s an idea. If Skelton and the L.A. Times like these exorbitant pensions so much, let’s tax them 100% to pay for it. Take all their income and all their property, and give it to CalPERS and CalSTIRS.  As the Marxists say: “Expropriate the expropriators!”