Today, again, the Intelligencer Journal warned of obvious, implacable, impending, fiscal doom, and we, as a state, seem to simply be content to push back judgment day:

School Districts: PA's Pension Relief No More than a Good Start
Pension Reform Proposal: A graphic display

You can read the details of this problem—the PA State Workers Pension Problem—in my post of December 16th. Basically, the state has made promises to state workers (particularly the teachers unions) that we will fund their retirement in a way that is fiscally impossible (or at least massively destructive for the entire state).

Judgment Day has now come. We need to start contributing more to make the fund solvent. Instead of doing this, or finding some long term solution, we keep pushing the problem down the road. (Many states have this problem. We are not in the worst shape—which is incredible.) I am guessing that some are counting on the fact that the federal government will bail out states and localities. This increasingly seems unlikely. What will then happen? We are either going to break these promises or states are going to go bankrupt. I cannot even contemplate what that means or looks like. If we simply tax to fund this, it will be an additional transfer of $4 billion dollars from the people of PA to the people of PA who work for the state. (Note, this story is getting increasing coverage, but there is one speck of misinformation floating around. People are now pinning this problem to the stock market drop. Stocks, no doubt, exasperated this problem, but I knew about this problem years ago. State legislators and school board members knew about it years ago. The slow train was coming down the tracks when stocks were sky high. We did nothing!)

What is at the root of this problem? A lot! But maybe deepest at the root is abdication. Instead of taking our responsibilities seriously as faithful believers we have decided to farm out education. This has had a powerfully negative economic impact. Education now has been dominated by professionals demanding “professional” salaries, although outcomes are decreasing. We invariably pour in more money—one of the top false gods of our age—to no avail.

What now? Here are a few brief, sensible proposals. They are steps that we need to take not to fix all of the problem, but to cap this economically-toxic oil spill:

1. Cap future benefits of all state employees. Make their retirements like those of the rest of the culture. The argument goes that state workers could make more in the private sector and thus they need to have great benefit packages to make ends meet. Let’s test the theory. If they want to try to make more, let them go to the private sector.

2. Education (particularly) must return to the market. Will the market bear the costs of public education? Obviously not! The tax burden that we bear for each public school student often matches, or even exceeds, the cost of top private school education. For the same money we can do so much better.

3. Christians must stop abdicating. We must fill lower level public offices and say no to this suicide pact called taxation. We need to start more schools—classical Christian schools—to meet the needs of more students and to give an education to the poor which is being denied them under the present system (a system which, quite honestly, views them as units that bring in funding). As believers we must not see the poor treated like this.

4. Finally, terribly, we must consider what bankruptcy looks like on a state level. We have written checks that cannot can’t be cashed.

Judgment Day is coming.