The state of Maine has a $4.3 billion pension shortfall. About 70,000 retirees are counting on a promised pension.

The workers did not create this fiscal nightmare. Nor did the other 1.2 million Mainers who are being saddled with this shortfall. Maine already is shouldering the fifth highest tax burden in the country. Ten percent of every taxpayer dollar goes toward state employee and teacher pension funds.

Additional Photos

Pro-labor demonstrators gather April 4 at the State House to protest Gov. LePage’s policies, including the removal of a mural depicting the history of labor from the Labor Department. The Associated Press

And the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting predicts that within five to six years, pension costs could account for 20 percent of the budget.

Maine State Treasurer Bruce Poliquin’s office calculates that nationally, average public sector compensation is $9,200 higher than counterparts in the private sector, with nearly $5,700 of that in the form of benefits.

Maine voters may also wonder why public employees contribute nominal amounts toward their pension and health benefits when those in the private sector have to pay so much more.

Maine’s financial straits did not arise in a vacuum. They come from nearly 50 years of power imbalance between unions and politicians.

The privileged class of government unions and liberal politicians demanding higher taxes and more spending for themselves and their ideology placed us in this position, while private sector unemployment is reaching post-Depression era levels.

Gov. LePage joins governors from Wisconsin, New Jersey and Ohio who are working to balance their states’ budgets by finally cutting spending and reining in sweetheart pensions.

LePage’s proposed cut in bloated retirement and benefit programs is an admirable commencement in the pursuit of fiscal responsibility for the state of Maine.

Steve Merritt
Old Orchard Beach

I was fortunate enough to retire from General Electric in 2003 at the age of 53 with 36 years of service. I have been receiving my pension and full medical benefits for myself and my wife since then. We will have G.E. medical insurance until Medicare kicks in at 65, then we will have G.E. supplemental insurance.

Unfortunately, many people my age 60-65 are financially able to retire but cannot because the cost of health care would cripple them.

Here is my proposal: The state of Maine and other states are spending billions on welfare and unemployment.

If you could help people 60-65 with a health care supplement, more people would retire in that age group and you could back fill those jobs from the unemployment and welfare ranks.

The money you save from lowering unemployment and welfare would create funds for the “60-65-year-old medical supplement retiree program” and you will get more tax revenue from more people working. Thank you. Keep up the good work, let’s all work together for the good of this great country.

Roger Bisson
Sanford

An insidious form of age discrimination has now appeared to gain respectability. In the name of fiscal responsibility, veteran teaching staff are being encouraged to retire often despite stellar performance levels.

These requests are frequently framed by highlighting the seniority earned through their hard work as bearing the blame for job and program cuts.

If altruism is not in itself enough to entice senior staff to leave, Gov. Le-Page’s proposed changes to benefits packages provides the second punch.

If a veteran teacher does not want to retire this year, they have been warned that chances are when they do, they will be getting less.

This has many veteran staff feeling cornered. They are leaving to avoid being cast adrift on the budget reduction iceberg being formed for those staff members that remain.

Ultimately, these tactics will hurt the education of the students. Homogeneous streamlining may be a model that works well for assembly lines, but schools are not factories. Caution should be used.

We lead through example. Our example should be one that demonstrates honor for experience and dedication, rather than one that promotes scapegoating when problems are faced.

Our country is facing a deficit in the trillions. Our finances must be realistic. The response should not be to eliminate valued teaching staff from town budgets. Instead, the solution should include to ensure that students be provided a quality education.

Cathleen Gallo
Kittery

Gov. LePage’s approach to pension reform consistently hits the lower and middle classes the hardest. His insistence on penalizing anyone who retires between 62 and 65 by making them pay 100 percent health premiums punishes people who have served this state long and hard.

If current retirees make $50,000 at retirement after 25 years, they will be eligible for approximately $25,000 in retirement a year (the current average is only $19,000 per year).

If new retirees have to pay their health insurance until age 65, that lowers their actual retirement income to $17,000 a year until age 65. This is punishing a handful of hardworking Mainers, who may have planned and/or need to retire within that age range for one reason or another.

Another way to tackle this system is to look at the top instead. Those 1,000 confidential state employees, who only pay 1.15 percent in pension contributions, could really make up the loss.

I don’t understand the logic of why they would get this benefit just because they don’t have an opportunity to join a collective bargaining unit and pay union dues.

When my collective bargaining unit negotiates a cost-of-living raise, the confidentials get the same increases in salary that we do.

If the average confidential employee makes $100,000 year (probably a low-ball figure), and they had to pay what the rest of us pay in pension contributions (7.65 percent), we would bring in $6.5 million in one year.

Isn’t this a more fair way to balance the budget?

Joyce Leslie
Peaks Island

As one with nearly 30 years working for the same company when I got caught in a nationwide downsizing, I feel no empathy for these public workers who are whining about having to pay an extra 2 percent to shore up their retirement fund.

At least they still have a job and a chance to use that money in the MePERS system.

I have spent considerable time looking at and comparing retirement plans between private and public systems, and it seems to me that the public sector does better than those in the private sector by a large margin.

From a USA Today article of 2007: “Retired government workers are twice as likely to get a pension as their counterparts in the private sector, and the typical benefit is far more generous. The nation’s 6 million retired civil servants — teachers, police, administrators, laborers — received a median benefit of $17,640 in 2005, according to the Congressional Research Service. Eleven million private-sector retirees covered by traditional pensions got $7,692.”

Per the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, “The number of private employers offering defined-benefit pensions has dropped precipitously. In 1985, some 112,000 private pension plans were insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., the government agency that insures private pension plans. Last year, the number dipped below 30,000. Among all private employers last year, just 11 percent offered defined-benefit pensions, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

On the public side, about 90 percent of 16 million local and state workers are covered by a defined-benefit pension, levels that have changed little of late.

All the whining by the public employees and their unions falls on the deaf ears of those in the private sector who must provide for their own retirement or starve on Social Security, if it’s still there when they retire.

George A. Fogg
North Yarmouth

I am sorry my public retirement benefits look like such a pot of gold to so many tea party members and conservatives.

With so much criticism about the state pension being voiced, I wonder if I should apologize for being a retired public worker. One of the benefit coins of my “pot of gold” was a 4-year retirement credit for my years of Vietnam-era military service. At the time, the credit made me feel honored that Maine people had awarded me something in return for my military service.

But since the tea party and conservative hard-liners seem to begrudge state retirement benefits in general, perhaps they too begrudge the military credit part of my state pension.

Also, I wonder if I should apologize for being a member of a labor union that helped to improve my state wages and benefits.

Without union help, perhaps my wages would have continued to make me eligible for food stamps as was the case during my first two years of state employment, ironically as a food stamps eligibility worker.

Finally, I can’t help wondering if tea party members and conservative hard-liners really want Gov. LePage busting unions and tearing down wall murals about Maine labor history.

That history improved wages and working conditions for everyone, even for the conservatives who now take the benefits for granted, benefits that help insure they won’t be easily injured or killed in the workplace like the victims of the Triangle Factory Fire 100 years ago.

Gary E. Larkin
Old Orchard Beach

I grew up in Lewiston during the heyday of the textile industry. My father worked in the mills and was a shop steward for the union.

However, in time he became very dissatisfied with the unions as he started to recognize firsthand the abusive demands they were making on the companies and their obnoxious squandering of the dues they were collecting. It is very important to distinguish between “unions” and “labor.”

The unions did not build the textile industry in Maine or any other textile city in New England. It was the hard-working people who worked in the mills. To a large extent the AFL-CIO was tagging along, collecting their dues and granting their leaders large increases in salary at the expense of those workers.

Eventually the well ran dry as companies either closed or moved to the Southern states, leaving behind many decimated cities. That was the unions’ accomplishment.

Look at Detroit today. Once it was the world leader in car manufacturing, but today it is decimated.

Before anyone tries to shift the blame on overseas competition, please recognize that Toyota, BMW, and others are manufacturing cars in the Southern states today and doing well.

The difference is the unions have no control there. One should also recognize that some of the highest-paying jobs in America today are in the high-tech industries that have risen to prominence in the last 50 years without the “help” of the unions.

So, those who are concerned about the labor mural should have it installed in the Portland Museum of Art.

As for Bill Nemitz and his constant attacks on the governor and anyone else who is not a leftist, perhaps every newspaper needs a garbage generator for entertainment.

Mike Morrissette
Harrison

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