The deputy sheriff at Majory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., is getting a state pension of $8,702.35 a month (more than $100,00 a year!). Scot Peterson is currently 55 and is likely to be paid this sum for his expected lifespan of, ooh, 30 more years or so. That’s also an inflation-protected sum and it’s not including whatever his healthcare benefits are. He’s already received the first check, another will be arriving this month. There’s nothing that can be done about this either.
The lesson to take from all of this is that we small-state libertarian types have been right all these years. We cannot afford the public services that state and local governments have all promised ourselves, and the tsunami that’s going to swamp the system is pension payments to state and local government workers.
Note what my argument is not: I am not saying that Mr. Peterson should not be paid the pension his contract says he should get. Tearing up the rule of law isn’t going to get us anywhere, ever. But we do need to note more than just the one thing about this. Given that expected lifespan, 32 years of work is going to produce something like $3 million as a stream of pensions payments.
Pensions are, as everyone should know, simply deferred pay from those years of work. We must therefore – and sorry, this really is the way to do it – say that his pay has been $100,000 a year higher, close enough, than his reported salary all those years. A very rough guide shows that a deputy sheriff is getting, before medical benefits, some $200,000 a year.
That’s quite a lot actually! And it’s the thing which is going to bankrupt the current system of governance. For what hasn’t been happening is us all being taxed sufficiently to cover these rates of pay for those in government services. We’ve been paying taxes to cover what governments (local, county, state) have been paying out in actual wages each year, but not enough to be putting money by for what is promised in the future.
That’s why multiple reports show how those pensions costs are going to come back and bite us all on the, well, fundament.
All of which is rather a blow to the basic progressive project, that we should be using government to do ever more for our lives. The point is, government cannot afford to be doing more. We horrible right-wing free-market people have actually been right these past few decades: we cannot afford to have more government. We cannot afford to pay for the government we’ve already promised ourselves.
Hey, maybe it’s right that someone who essentially worked as a school guard gets a $100,000 a year pension. But someone, somewhere has got to pay for that, and it’s you and me as taxpayers. That means tax rates are going to have to rise into the future to pay for the government we’ve already had – there’s no room for us to pay for more.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
