wisconsin steve janus an employee of the wisconsin department of corrections. from indiana, the union steel worker paul rauch, and in ohio with us tonight tracy radich, a sixth grade teacher. mr. janus, let me ask you first. well let me ask all three of you. give me a show of hands if you agree with the legislation in your state. okay. i agree with you. i got no hand signs on this one at all. mr. janus, what does this mean? what do you stand to lose? first of all, thank you, ed, for having me on the show and giving all of wisconsin s public employees a voice on your show. what we stand to lose is you deserve to tell the story no question about it. i want to know, what do you stand to lose personally? personally we re going backwards in our health and benefits. we have made concessions in regards to our pension
independent contractors negotiate the contracts and not the elected officials, who are helping out their been factors. arbitrators, perhaps, could be called in but they have in the past, when they have been have sided with the unions. we need a new approach, wisconsin and oklahoma will be looking at collective bargaining and whether public employees should have exactly the same rights as private sector union members in negotiating these. the property tax increases, by the way, the reason they vary so much, is because almost all of these cities are raising prop taxes, are doing it because of pension increases. and, if they don t have well funded pension programs and aren t excessive you are not seeing property taxes go up but in your town, they are going up, it is probably because the pensions are out of whack. gregg: raise the retirement age, and who gets to retire at 55? i ll be 105 by the team i can afford to retire. raising the retirement age is almost always for new hires
this is according to an to collect blankets for area article out of manhattan homeless people. institute. they say over the next r5 years the state and local his parents helped him to set government s payments to new up a wedge page to help him york state pensions are going to triple and for the school districts they ve collect 100 blankets. quadrupled, an 18 percent word spread fast and now they increase in full property have 300, of them. tax, just to pay for rising i was so pensions. so your school property taxes, you know how you have to pay those when you buy a house, they ve gone up 1 percent in new york state, just to fund the pension increases, and we re already in the red in this state on so many other areas. you can try to raise a taxes a whole lot more to bring in the money you need, that s not going to work, you can cut services, education, welfare, health, police, fire department, cut them to the bone, that s a dire idea, or, you can go to the federal government and ge