In the Weekly Standard article entitled
"Give States a Way to Go Bankrupt," that was qouted in the original post, the author, a professor at UPenn writes:
"With liquidation off the table, the effectiveness of state bankruptcy would depend a great deal on the state’s willingness to play hardball with its creditors. The principal candidates for restructuring in states like California or Illinois are the state’s bonds and its contracts with public employees. <snip>
The bankruptcy law should give debtor states even more power to rewrite union contracts, if the court approves. Interestingly, it is easier to renegotiate a burdensome union contract in municipal bankruptcy than in a corporate bankruptcy. Vallejo has used this power in its bankruptcy case, which was filed in 2008. It is possible that a state could even renegotiate existing pension benefits in bankruptcy, although this is much less clear and less likely than the power to renegotiate an ongoing contract."
What these pundits do NOT write about (that a number of posters to similar forums HAVE mentioned) is the law of unintended consequences. It's easy to lump all public sector workers together and rail against the "fact (real or imagined)" that they ALL make obscene amounts of money - not to mention the benefits that most Americans do not.
What they do not seem to realize is that until relatively recently in our nation's history have public sector employees received any kind of wage or benefits beyond mere subsistance. In the "you get what you pay for" department, do we really want public sector employees of the same or similar caliber as TSA employees? I think we're all pretty sure where most of them were in their lives before being offered what, in their case, is tantamount to a kind of workfare.
In other words, it's going to be pretty difficult to hire the brightest and best to serve the public and our nation if you break faith with the current and former public employees, and offer future employees little in the way of compensation. I sure as hell wouldn't put up with what we who work for the government put up with if it weren't for the compensation. Don't get me wrong: it's a good compensation package. It's at least on par with what I'd be making in the private sector for the same kind of work (with 20 times the red tape and the rules and regulations).
We've devolved as a nation in many ways. One of them is a knee-jerk reactionism that never fully maps out the possible consequences of our perhaps well-intentioned rush to "fix" things.
I don't disagree that we have a problem, Houston, but blame-laying and rushes to judgement are no way to go about a stable, long-term solution.
