Death By Pandering

I graduated engineering school in the mid 80s, at the front end of Reagan’s defense buildup. My final spring, I interviewed widely in the defense sector, and received two job offers. One on the private (”contractor”) side, and one on the government side. The private sector salary was 35% greater than the government job, which was normal at the time. Back then, we all knew that government jobs paid less but offered greater benefits and job security. You weren’t going to get paid as well working for Uncle Sam, but you were going to be well-tended.

I opted for the contractor job, and have no regrets.

The “less pay, better benefits” trope popped into my head as I read the latest panic-giveaway being engineered by my governor. Kathy Hochul, governor of New York State, who owes her job to Andrew Cuomo’s odiousness, is facing re-election this year. She is walking a tightrope, trying to feed the constituencies that fund her campaign, slake the thirst of the Democratic Socialists who took power in New York City, keep up a pretense of a moderate image, and all the while keep the State from further spiraling down a fiscal pit. Of her own exacerbation.

She’s been in over her head since the day she took office.

Her latest brilliant idea? Pander to the unions by reducing the retirement age for certain unionized workers hired after 2012 from 62 to 55. That includes teachers and nurses, from what I’ve read. To the tune of $1.5B.

In other words, two major voting blocs are being bought off ahead of the next election, with the bill to be paid by future taxpayers. And the notion that public sector workers take less compensation in return for greater security becomes ever-quainter as the benefits become ever greater.

When Social Security was created, the retirement age was set to 65. Guess what life expectancy was at the time? Yep, 65. As the decades passed, human progress raised life expectancy to about 80 in the US, but Social Security’s retirement age was only ticked up a couple years. A system poorly designed from the start, that has been a Ponzi-scheme wealth transfer from workers to retirees since its inception, is doomed to collapse absent major reforms in the near future. All because politicians have been and continue to be craven panderers rather than responsible stewards.

It’s our own fault, of course. We keep electing and re-electing these fools, and continuing to believe their promises no matter how bad the math is. And no, we are not that stupid. We are merely that self-indulgent. We don’t care about the whole, as long as we get ours. Yes, the progressives claim they are the ones who care about the poor and the oppressed, but what they really care about are their own egos. Bad math and failed ideas appeal to their “better than thou” arrogance, as if their superiority can suspend reality this time around.

If a majority of New Yorkers re-elect Hochul this fall, they will get the same “government they deserve, good and hard” as NYCers are getting from the smiling socialist snake Mayor Mamdani. The shitty part is that the rest of us have to suffer the results of their stupidity. A government that panders to the selfish is a government that will kill its host in short order.