Compromise needed to solve budget crisis

Governor Jerry Brown has proposed changing the retirement age from 55 to 67 years for public employees. When this was proposed, loud protest from teachers across the state brought attention to the flaws of this plan. Not only does the state already cut off funding for education that students desperately need, it is also making future generations of teachers rethink their career paths. Is this proposal really a solution to the financial crisis in California?

We at The Olympian believe that a compromise would be the best way to deal with this situation. This compromise would set the retirement age at about 62 instead of 67, and would raise the tax on the rich a little higher. This way, the state would still end up with the same amount of revenue as it would receive in Governor Brown’s proposal, and public employees would still get the benefits of retirement they deserve.

Since 2008, California has been having economic problems. Due to these economic problems, the state doesn’t have enough money to fully cover the pension for retired public employees. Pensions are funded by three sources: contributions by the employees, contribution by the government, and investment returns. In this economic time, depending on investments is a risk; Wall Street has been dropping rapidly, and since investment results are linked to the benefits of pensions, money for pensions is also decreasing.

A part of the compromise that would help California’s financial crisis and not affect the public employees too much would be to increase their retirement age to 62. This age is a reasonable number because most teachers don’t retire until their mid-sixties anyway. Another part would be raising taxes on the wealthiest citizens. Even though poverty is currently increasing, rich are still rich. By increasing their taxes a little higher, the 1% would help the state and the remaining 99%. It won’t be much money for them since they probably can’t even count how many zeros are in their bank accounts.

As students, we at The Olympian appreciate how much time and effort teachers put in to teach us. Since teachers already have a hard and demanding job and deal with kids who often don’t appreciate what they do, increasing the retirement age is unfair to them. Also, having older teachers affects the future generation of teachers because this new generation would have fewer teaching jobs available. So we encourage Californians to consider The Olympian compromise!