re: Is amendment 2 a good or bad thing?

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Based on the type of people against it

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Why do you think its a good thing to not read the actual amendment and only rely on the bit on the ballot? Because the only people voting for this garbage are the idiots who didn't read it.

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I’d be interested to see voter turnout for this election. My precinct was surprisingly busy for a random election.

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I live in St.George so we had a bunch of stuff on the ballot. I voted at 10am. The lady that is always there told me I was the 11th person that came in to vote. She did say that she thought a good bit of the people early voted, but she said it was still the slowest she’s ever seen it.

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For years they've been after the TRSL funds. Liquidating the three trust funds packaged behind tax cuts seem shady. They are removing them without any guarantee they are going to actually put money into the system later. 2 billion used now to pay down the 11 billion in then unfunded liabilities without a plan doesn't seem awesome.

Especially when it's tucked away and bribing the teachers with a 2k salary increase that's not really an increase and not guaranteed to move over year to year.

Seems fishy as shite. They could have broken this up into sections and addressed each one.


Edit to add they claim they'll pay down from of the liability.. it'll end up in the general fund and screw over the pensions. They've wanted that for years.

They'll eventually go after all of it.

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Wow, that's just all kinds of wrong.

Irrelevant now, but wrong.

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Well clearly you had no idea what that part of the amendment was about. I will try to make it easier for you.

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….let's break this down, shall we?

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The teachers have retirement savings accounts.

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- correct

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The teachers owe billions to the teacher’s retirement system. They have to pay interest to the retirement system because they are so far behind on payments.

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- This is not accurate. The "teachers" don't owe anything. The State has promised to pay retirees, but they have not set aside sufficient funds to keep up with rising salaries and retirees living longer. But there's little to no actual debt (i.e. bond issuances) that are associated with it. It's an unfunded liability. So it's not accruing interest.

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The interest they make in their savings accounts are way less than the interest they owe.

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- TRSL's investments have been doing quite well the past few years. They've reduced the employer matching rate they charge to local districts by about 4% over the past few years. And, again, they don't owe a lot of interest.

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The only thing those savings accounts can be used for is for paying the retirement system. So they were going to liquidate the savings accounts and pay down their debt.

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- This is not accurate at all. The State was going to liquidate three trust funds. I'm not sure what the third one is, but one is the Education Excellence Fund (EEF) and the other is 8g. EEF is the tobacco settlement money awarded to the states years ago. The State has allocated a certain amount to each district to use at their discretion (with prior approval). 8g is used for Pre-K programs. So if EEF and 8g went away, your local district was going to lose discretionary and Pre-K funding, meaning they would either have to come out of pocket to pay for those programs or cut them.

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They would have save so much money a year that they would have been able to give teachers ~$2000 raise

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- The Louisiana Department of Education released a projection of seven different scenarios of what they thought the savings would look like based on estimated rates of return and reduction in the unfunded liability. In three of the seven, most districts saved enough to cover the raises and in the other four most districts would lose money on the raise. This is beside the fact that districts would lose the EEF and 8g funds mentioned above.

TLDR: local districts were going to have to foot the bill for the raises because the State hasn't planned well enough for the future.

lets keep doin what we do cause it works so GOOD you assholes

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The districts would not “lose money” on the dea

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I see you skipped over the part about the loss of EEF and 8g funding.

21% according to sec of State

That’s actually not bad considering it was mostly just constitutional amendments.

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Wow, that's just all kinds of wrong.

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Explain.

Does it not liquidate the trusts?

Does it not claim to use the money to pay down the debt and then the local school board can use the money they would have put in on raises for staff and teachers without plans on exactly how to fund the TRSL in the future?

I. All for shifting to a 401k style away from pension. Especially since my mother died from dementia after 40 years of teaching and my father received nothing and her entire retirement went back to the state...

I've sat in meetings as a child where they were voting to keep the state from "borrrowing" from the TRSL. They've already had massive short funding of the plan.