The June 27 editorial, “Paying for pensions: With under funding projected, it’s time to revisit how they are formulated,” is yet another subtle attack on state workers and the state pension system.
It is well-known that most increases in life expectancy come from drops in infant mortality, and that your position on the socioeconomic ladder is a better indicator of your personal life expectancy. In other words, a person making $30,000 a year doing physical labor will not live as long as an executive making more than $100,000 a year.
The contention that the state has traditionally fully funded the pension system flies in the face of the previous decade, where the funding average for state pensions was only 58.4 percent.
Instead of the subtle inference that the state pension fund is preventing full funding of K-12 education, just maybe The Columbian should be asking how the Legislature can always find tax breaks and subsidies for corporations and special interests instead of funding our schools. One example is Boeing, which in 2003 got $3.2 billion in tax breaks and just this year another $8 billion in tax incentives.
