Month: September 2013

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I posted last week that this ruling was coming, (Update) Lawsuit to challenge the initiative to bankrupt the City of Tucson, but now it is official; the Pima County Superior Court entered its Order on Tuesday. Jim Nintzel at the Tucson Weekly writes, City Pension Initiative Headed For November Ballot:

The court battle over the proposed initiative to scrap the city’s
pension system is over. Pima County Superior Court Judge James Marner
issued a ruling today putting Prop 201 on the ballot, so voters will get
to decide the issue in November.

The city’s unions had tried to strike enough signatures from the
petitions to knock the Sustainable Retirement Benefits initiative off
the ballot, but didn’t quite manage to get enough of them disqualified.
After all was said and done, backers of the proposal had 13,777 valid
signatures, which exceeded the required 12,730, according to Marner's
ruling.

Meanwhile, the latest campaign-finance report from the Yes on 201
Committee shows that it’s not exactly a local effort. All but $1,900 of
the $159,925 received by the committee has come from either the Liberty
Initiative Fund or the National Taxpayers Union, two Virginia-based
groups.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Washington Post takes a break from its war fever to address GOP efforts to sabotage "ObamaCare" in an editorial opinion today. Republicans should get out of the way of Obamacare:

You wouldn’t think state leaders would need convincing to accept
mountains of federal cash to help people with meager incomes obtain
health insurance. But many Republican leaders and activists have waged a
disruptive and harmful campaign to complicate, delay and undermine the
ACA, which starts phasing in when state insurance markets begin
enrolling customers in a month.

The most prominent efforts have been in Congress, where conservatives’ latest move
has been to insist on holding the government budget process hostage to
obtain cuts in funds intended for ACA implementation. But the most
disruptive activity has been at the state level. Twenty-one states
have refused to expand their Medicaid programs, blowing a large hole in
the ACA’s coverage strategy. The Urban Institute estimates that 5
million people won’t get coverage as a result.

As The Post’s Sandhya Somashekhar reported last week, Republicans at the state level also have applied a variety of less visible measures
to impede the law’s implementation. Some won’t enforce consumer
protections, including a ban on insurance companies rejecting patients
with pre-existing conditions. The result will be illegal discrimination.
Another tactic has been restricting the work of federal “navigators,”
consumer assistants who help people understand their options and get
coverage. The result will be more people without health insurance.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Lydia DePillis at Ezra Klein's Wonkblog writes 401(k)s are replacing pensions. That’s making inequality worse.

The once-dominant defined benefit pension plan–which pays out a fixed amount after an employee retires–is on its way to becoming an historical artifact. More and more employers are offering 401(k) plans instead,
which require employees to pay into their own accounts, sometimes with
and sometimes without a matching contribution. And according to a new analysis
from the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute, the effect has been a
stratification of retirement savings by education, income, and
race–which could deepen inequality among the elderly as the population
ages.

It’s actually possible to tell [spin] a positive story here, in which the average size of retirement accounts has grown overall in recent decades, and aggregate saving and household net worth as a percentage of income have started to bounce back since the recession first hit in 2008.

But the moral starts to change as you look underneath the numbers. Those
benefits split among a smaller share of the population: Overall, the
percentage of workers participating in all employer-based retirement
plans declined over the past couple decades, across all age groups.

That’s because the top-earning people are choosing to put a lot more
money away, while those who earn less can’t afford to. Retirement
savings by the top fifth of income earners have risen markedly, while they’ve declined or risen only slightly for most everyone else: