STUMP » Articles » Pension Quickie: Paying For Hamburgers on Tuesday... or Not at All » 28 August 2018, 16:55

So, some people are huffy about this:

Bevin invokes Wimpy’s hamburger line in pension reform lawsuit

FRANKFORT, Ky. — At the outset of his 100-page brief asking the Kentucky Supreme Court to overturn a lower court ruling that struck down the new pension law, Gov. Matt Bevin quotes the signature line of Popeye cartoon character J. Wellington Wimpy.

“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”

Bevin argues, “Sadly, this has been Kentucky’s approach to public pensions for the last two decades. We have eaten all the hamburgers, and now Tuesday is here, and it is time to pay the bill.”

Funnily enough, I don’t really have an issue with that.

From a post I wrote in 2014:

In all of these cases, the future was going to be a magical place where money appeared from the air to pay for the promises made decades ago. Because the money just had to be there. It was promised.

Remember I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today? Everybody knew that Wimpy would never pay, even though the promised payment was less than a week away.

People need to understand that the “I’ll gladly pay you in 20 years for a skipped pension payment today” is about as sincere.

Thing is, I believe the Kentucky bill won’t ultimately get paid.

RIDICULING THE RIDICULOUS

I have many problems with Bevin’s “reforms”, most of which fall back on: he didn’t do the work required to actually get pension reform. He’s going to lose the court case, and rightly so. It would actually require amending the Kentucky state constitution to reduce KY pensions to a level that the state can actually afford. Doing it in the ham-handed manner he tried got nothing done other than pissing off a lot of people.

But I want to address the use of silly sayings or animated gifs, etc., to make a point.

I like animated gifs.

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But generally when I use them and various silly quotes/phrases it’s because I’m ridiculing what is ridiculous.

I take public pension issues extremely seriously. Which is why I use animated gifs and other tools of ridicule against people I think do not take these issues seriously.

Who think POBs are “clever”. Who think pensions don’t ever have to be fully-funded and pay-as-you-go isn’t really dangerous.

These are fundamentally unserious people, if they parrot:

“Government doesn’t go out of business!”

“It will save money!”

“We can do it pay-as-you-go!”

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But me yelling into the wind is not going to be particularly effective.

I may not be able to convince others of the evil, but I should be able to convince that these “clever” people are ridiculous. And they are.

Yes, I use graphs and numbers and all, but I am deliberately using silly things like animated gifs to punctuate the fact that these people with fancy titles and polysyllabic utterances, looking and sounding so “serious” are seriously deceptive or flat out wrong.

Also, animated gifs are fun.

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Also, Bevin: do your homework next time. This is sloppy.

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