Tricky Dick at it again

Yesterday there was a story that Rick Scott was up to more fun and games.  On a special website he had made to prop up his crusade to bastardize state employees, he posted a link to 500 former state workers that receive a pension worth more than 100K a year. This makes for a great headline for the sheep, STATE WORKERS GET $100,000 PENSIONS!!!!!!

This is so insulting on so many levels.

Let’s start with the most obvious.  All of this rhetoric and pining for government transparency is coming from Rick Scott.  The same Rick Scott that was so transparent that he pleaded the 5th 75 times during his questioning regarding Medicare fraud committed by the company he was in charge of.  The same company that wound up paying 1.7 BILLION dollars in fines for their transparently fraudulent activities. The hypocrisy here is sickening.

To have someone that was able to spend upwards of 70 million dollars of his own personal fortune to narrowly get elected via one of the dirtiest smear campaigns on record point a gold encrusted finger at a former state employees is equally ludicrous.

Ok let’s look at these $100,000 pension holders.  They represent .17 percent of all state pensions.   Yes, there is a period in front of the number.  A percentage that is so small that it would be categorized as statistically insignificant by anyone that knows numbers.  Even with these few individuals with these admittedly huge pensions it doesn’t change that the average pension for a state employee works out to something like 16k a year. Oh also, all of these pensions referenced were over a decade ago, minor detail he left out.

Headlines like this work the tea party crazies into a frenzy. LOOK, we are paying for all of these fat cat pensions.  They shouldn’t have pensions because WE DON’T.

This is where the hypocrisy slaps me in the face a second time.  Tea Party folk are almost exclusively Obama haters, crying from every rooftop, STOP THE MUSLIM SOCIALIST!  They lament the idea of national health care or other government benefits that come from redistributing wealth from the upper tier of society.

Yet, this same hive mind has no issues bitching and complaining about state workers if they perceive they have benefits that exceed something they have.  They would prefer if state employees were paid in exactly the same manner as they are?  Sounds hypocritical huh? That’s because it is.  They basically are looking for a SOCIALIST employment compensation system where individuals are paid the same regardless of their education, experience or qualifications.

Don’t give me this bullshit line “yea, but state workers don’t have to pay into their pension”.  A pension is just part of the compensation for the employee, in this case deferred compensation.  Just because it is deferred doesn’t mean it should be looked at as any less real than an hourly wage.

And for the record, I am not in the pension plan.

Idiots.