It needs to be widely circulated.

Sam

but when I looked at California pensions it turns out that they withhold about what would have been withheld under Social Security for the employee portion. The state on the other hand contributes like 2% (instead of the 6.5% they would have had to) under Social Security. The benefits for the California state workers are greater than they would have been under Social Security, and the state of California gets to save a huge amount of dollars from not having to contribute to Social Security.

This comes about because the state worker's compensation is beter on average than the cross section of the population contributing to Social Security.

If anybody is a winner in California it is the state. While the pension is better than Social Security, it is not that much better.

I wonder if it is the same in Wisconsin?

My numbers may be off some because I looked at this awhile ago.

I haven't looked at this one, but typically there's a problem with the tenses and aspect.

The first thing the article had better do is specify the time frame. Is it's point that this month no public money goes to the pension funds? Or is its point that there's no obligation currently likely to result from the current promises that public money will ever have to cover, given no changes to contribution totals by those invested in the pension program.

We're taught that the simple present tense means the present. The simple present tense in English can mean that something is happening currently (in the right syntactic context) but more often means something is habitual or durative. "The sun rises in the East" is a statement of repeated fact. "I get up every morning at 5:15 am" is true even though it's 20 minutes from my bedtime--and only true for 5 of the next 9 days. It's not semantically "present tense" in any straightforward meaning of the phrase, apart from a few simple stative verbs.

So "no public money funds public worker pensions" can be true but how true and true for how long? For a number of cities and states it's true but there are large commitments in the pension plans that there's no way for those invested in the pension plans to fund. The ambiguity of the morphological simple present obscures a future fact, and the simple-mindedness of public school grammatical education enables this ambiguity to go unnoticed by erstwhile native speakers of the language (who lack all grammatical introspection, it seems).

Since there's no way to present an argument without first agreeing on the definitions of the relevant terms, and since in this case the grammatical form's meaning crucially needs defining, I assume that's the first thing that the article does.