Obama’s Cloward-Piven Policies Causing Ominous Rumblings in Philly

Obama’s Cloward-Piven Policies Causing Ominous Rumblings in Phill

Firefighter Union to City: Liar, liar, pants on… you get it already.

Exactly a week ago, it was written here how a fire in West Philadelphia killed a 12 year old boy. Much blame was put on the fact that Philly’s Democrat Mayor Michael Nutter recently made Fire Department cutbacks, or “brownouts” to punish us all for not going along with this stupid soda tax idea.

Please bear with me, before I begin this story a little back story is necessary. Apparently Philadelphia is our future and we need to see where the present proposed Marxist policies will lead us, if we allow them to be adopted.

First you need to know what the DROP program is as it seems to be the root cause of the problem.

The Committee of Seventy continues to do our job for us with a succinct explanation of the city’s embattled Deferred Retirement Option Plan (DROP). Simply put, DROP is a way for city workers to both collect salary and accumulate pension money over the last four years of their employment. DROP was originally introduced as a revenue neutral management tool, and largely flew under the radar until last week when Mayor Nutter announced that revenue neutral really means it costs $22 million a year.

What is DROP anyway?

It’s a program that was designed to keep experienced employees on the job a few extra years to train their replacements. City Council created it in 1999, worried that police and firefighters from the Baby Boom generation would retire all of a sudden with nobody to take their places.

How does it work?

An employee promises to retire but stays on the job for as long as four years. The employee keeps getting a regular salary, but gets a pension payment too. The city puts the pension payment in an account that earns 4.5 percent interest. When the employee finally retires for real, he or she gets that pension money in one big lump. Most of that is money the employee would have gotten from a normal retirement anyway, but there is that extra from the interest as well. And remember that the employee has been getting a regular salary all that time too.

This charming, innocent program which (for a few examples) is playing out like this: