Everyone knows that public sector pensions are driving US
states into insolvency, and that the road to fiscal sanity runs through
virtuous austerity, and requires that we rein in these public sector commitments.
That piece of common knowledge leads to stories like
this
one: stories that blame the pension problem - that is, that parrot 'fiscally
conservative' politicians who blame the pension problem - for looming threats
to vital governmental functions.
Here's how all that looks in Pennsylvania, where the state
budget secretary released a report (a policy report, mind you, not a political
document reflecting party discipline on a matter of ideology) saying just what
you think it would say. First: "Without reforms, the state could be forced
to cut funding for public safety, health and human services, education, roads
and bridges." Then, the solution, as reported by Reuters: "Instead of
raising taxes or cutting current retirees' pension payments, [PA Governor Tom] Corbett
should consider increasing employee contributions, raising the retirement age
and moving away from a defined-benefit plan, the report recommended."
What this story and stories like it leave out is that the
pension problem is not just a problem; it is the core of a political tactic,
and the tactic involves treating the problem as a
fetish. The pension problem
becomes a fetish in the sense that it is treated as a magical phenomenon, with
no discernible causes or relations to other states of affairs. So it's not as
if
pension
funds lost value when the bursting housing bubble took down state revenues, or
when the stock market collapsed afterward. (Recognizing that factor might
put the question of increasing revenue on the table. Or the question of what
else took down state revenues, including
shady
Wall Street financing deals.) And it's not as if these public funds were
throwing good money after bad by contracting with Wall Street investment
managers, whose work
underperforms
both their benchmarks and cheaper index funds that are not actively
managed. (Recognizing that factor might put on the table the question of our
ongoing fealty to Wall Street, and of Wall Street's virtually unacknowledged
responsbility for the dire economic straits that most people not on Wall Street
now face in one way or another.) It's just that we've finally come to see that
we can't afford these pensions, no matter what.
I mention this fetishization of the problem not to say that
the underfunding of public pensions is not really a problem - it is a problem, don't get me wrong, given
the horizons of our politics and economic policy now. I mention it because it
is they key to a political strategy, one of the defining ones of our time. The
pension issue is constructed not just as a problem but as the problem, when it might be construed instead as one of the many
symptoms of some deeper problems. But treating public sector pensions as the
main problem is nicely compatible with campaigns to shrink the state, and to
discipline labor, and to foment tensions between private sector workers and
their public sector counterparts as a way of disciplining labor, and so on.
