That fizzing and popping you hear is my blood boiling as I read this article in a back issue (June 6) of our local rag, Long Island Newsday.

As [New York] state officials struggle to close gaping holes in the budget and deal with skyrocketing retirement costs, records show that at least 1,325 retirees collect six-figure pensions from the state — and nearly one-half of them are from Long Island.

Which is where I live. So why am I in the hole for these public-sector pensions?

With New York state retirement funds compelled to make up losses of more than $73 billion because of the recession, many are worried that school districts and local governments will have to turn to taxpayers to cover the costs. Private accounts such as a 401(k) rise and fall with the market, and have no such safety net. “There’s going to be massive increases” in taxes to make up for the losses, said E.J. McMahon, executive director of the Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank in Albany.

The two “Click here” links at the bottom of that story put names to the dollars.

• James Hunderfund, an employee of Commack school district, will retire September 1 with a monthly pension of $26,353.75. (Nothing hunderfunded about his pension plan, ho ho.)

• Richard Brande of Brookhaven-Comsewogue will also be heading for the golf course September 1 with a monthly pension of $24,222.43.

• William Brosnan cleans out his desk at Northport-East Northport July 1, and for the rest of his life will trouser a monthly pension of $19,058.80.

No offense to these guys — well, not much offense — but they are small-town education bureaucrats. Not only will they be getting annual pensions in the quarter-million-dollar range for the rest of their naturals, they are getting these numbers by law. If New York State’s pension-fund managers goof on the investments, or the market craters, we taxpayers have to make up the difference.

It’s not just edbiz either, though of course edbiz exhibits the greatest outrages. (Can’t we please just GET RID OF PUBLIC EDUCATION?) Local-gummint seat-warmers are on the same gravy train.

• Dvorah Balsam of Nassau [County] Health Care Corp., annual pension $191,380.32

• Stanley Klimberg of Long Island Power Authority: $191,380.32.

• Gerald Shaftan, Nassau Health Care Corp. again, $181,457.76.

These folk are all, as no doubt they would be proud to tell you, “public servants.” The idea behind that phrase is that they are like butlers or housemaids, placing themselves willingly at the beck and call of us, the sovereign public. So how come we, the sov. pub., spend our twilight years clipping coupons in rusting trailers in the Ozarks while our servants enjoy the beach condo in Maui? Do other citizens, like me, gag at the phrase “public servant”? I always associate it with the Clintons and their claque, who threw it around pretty freely. Same deal: Bill and Hill got wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice without ever doing anything an ordinary person would recognize as work. They lived in publicly-supplied housing till late middle age. Nice little racket, this “public service.”

Now of course there are public tasks to be carried out, and we need people willing to do them. Do we have to remunerate those people quite so extravagantly, though? We never used to. It’s not the Anglo-Saxon tradition. When Harry Truman left office in 1953, he had no income but his army pension of $112.56 a month. He had to take out a bank loan while negotiating a deal to write his memoirs. That was the way of things all over the Anglosphere. It was part of the tradition of modest Anglo-Saxon government. When Bob Menzies, Australia’s longest-serving prime minister, left office in 1966 after 18 years in power, having given up a lucrative legal career for politics, he could not afford to buy a house in Melbourne. (Some wealthy supporters eventually put up funds for a house in a respectable suburb.) Now small-town edbiz paper-shufflers retire with net-present-value payouts of millions stuffed in the pockets of their jeans.

The competition for the title Worst Idea The Human Race Has Yet Come Up With is stiff indeed, but “public-sector labor union” must surely be among the lead contenders.

I think the guy Newsday quotes at the end of the article gets it right:

For Jim Malloy, a 44-year-old self-employed business consultant from Smithtown, the solution is simple: He plans to move out of state.
“I feel like a fool,” he said. “I feel like I get up and go to work everyday to pay for everyone else’s retirement.”

You do, Jim, you do. But hey, these are public servants, dontcherknow, selflessly sacrificing their working lives, toiling from sun up to sun down day after day, to improve our lives. You’re not even grateful?