The new enemy

The economy has a new enemy, and you saw it in the voting on Tuesday: retirees.

While Wisconsin was teaching its unions a lesson, San Jose and San Diego were teaching their municipal retirees a lesson.

Voters in both of those cities cut the pensions of public employees by huge margins. It was a bipartisan effort: both Democrats and Republicans joined the landslide vote that cut benefits.

Governments have trimmed their pension plans before, but it usually applied only to new employees. San Jose and San Diego will be cutting current beneficiaries.

And other cities are very interested.

Even some private companies are very interested because it shows there are legal ways to take away pensions that workers thought were locked in.

The idea that people deserve their retirement no matter what seems to be slowly changing. Boomer retirees look a little too comfortable. They may have earned it fair and square, but when you’re paying 27% of the budget to people who aren’t working – as San Jose was – it’s hard to justify, especially to younger employees who know they have no chance at anything remotely as generous.

But there is a downside to cutting retirements. I just want to alert the Millenials that this means a lot of us Baby Boomers may decide we need to keep working well into our Betty White years. That means we’ll be right there next to you into our 70’s and 80’s swapping funny blood pressure anecdotes, and not appreciating your irony or getting your Dub Step references.

We also tend to brag about the used underwear we bought at the thrift store. Anyway, have a good weekend. See you at work Monday. And Tuesday. And…you know…