“People talk about the middle of the road as though it were unacceptable. Actually, all human problems, excepting morals, come into the gray areas. Things are not all black and white. There have to be compromises. The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower.

As such, I am sure conservatives have in place the great follow-through to help with the poor and needy once the federal government ceases this activith, since a nation can’t both feed the poor and buy Wii’s at the same time.

What’s the proper role and size of government is a legitimate debate over which reasonable people can disagree, but refusing to pay for the spending demanded and leaving the next generation the debt for our spending is outrageous. They will justly damn our generation for our lack of discipline and for the inheritance of debt which we will leave them.

And, if so, was it deceitful to have promised these folks their pensions at those rates, hoping to bankrupt the government and then reneging on those promises?

The voters have brought us to this moment. I was a voter during these decisions and the states’ voters were clear…we’ll pay later for these pensions.

Is this just to merely say “sorry, can’t do that?” These are decades old decisions to defund the pension plans without being upfront to the worker. Is this fair?

“I do like the idea of that the pension benefits arrangements are in fact ‘promises.’

Can one ditch such promises so easily?”

A few points.

1. The promise made to those now dependent or soon to be dependent must be met. Justice demands that. The promise needs to be changed to younger adults and soon so that they too don’t become dependent on an unsustainable entitlement.

2. It’s even worse than TimC suggests as it is not your neighbor’s money being promised without his consent but it is your and your neighbor’s children and grandchildren’s money. We are and have been for a long time robbing from future generations at the same time we have been squandering our inheritance from our frugal ancestors. Making promises with other people’s money is a bad as breaking promises. If we want to do charity, we need to do it with our own money.

3. That leads me to point 3. I believe it is legitimate to debate how much we want government to provide retirement and health care benefits, but we need to have a mechanism in place to make sure that the generation that makes the promise is the generation that pays for it. A balanced budget amendment (nuanced to permit debt for capital investments (e.g., roads, buildings, etc., with long useful lives), war and severe economic downturns, etc.) would do the trick. If you want a Medicare program and don’t want to cut other spending enough to pay for from existing revenues, you have to raise new revenue NOW to pay for the program.

4. I actually favor further defense cuts. However, our spending for defense as measure in GDP has been cut by more than half in the last 50 years. We certainly can save more, but, frankly, you could eliminate all defense spending (not a prudent thing to do) and we would still have huge deficits. The solution is to either slash entitlements, drastically raise taxes or a combination of the two. I favor the latter, combined with a balanced budget amendment which is implemented slowly over a decade.

On the other hand, we have been knowingly reckless about promising what isn’t ours to give and/or what we can’t really deliver or afford.

This is a huge problem because private corporations have been declaring bankruptcy for the express purpose of getting out of expensive retiree benefits. So what we have in both the public and the private sector are large numbers of people who thought they could count on much-needed retirement benefits, but who aren’t going to get those benefits.

Call it a promise or not, but if the money’s not there, they’re not going to get those benefits.

What we need to do is IMO twofold. On the one hand, we need to get our finances under control, because if we crash nobody’s going to have a nice retirement, period.

But we also need to do something to ensure that none of these people who thought they’d have a retirement benefits package coming to them are thrown into poverty.

They may have to accept that they aren’t going to have all the money they thought they’d have. But they should have enough to live on, and they should have health coverage.

We can’t survive as a society if we let people do that to each other. Trust is a precondition of the cohesiveness necessary to functioning.

If I promise my buddy my neighbor’s money without my neighbor’s consent or knowledge, that is a promise that can and ought to be “ditched”. Likewise with public pensions.

I do like the idea of that the pension benefits arrangements are in fact “promises.”

Can one ditch such promises so easily?

Dan, I just promised myself that you would pay me a million dollars. By next week.

Will you ditch this promise?