I’m here in Los Angeles (no, not sunning myself at the beach) and caught a disturbing article in The Los Angeles Times by one of its columnists, Steve Lopez. The piece was entitled “Deals So Sweet They’ll Kill Us: Worried about your 401(k) tanking in your golden years?
You should become a cop.”

The upshot of Lopez’s piece: public employees are getting pensions that are just too generous. And Lopez is supposed to be one of the paper’s “liberal” columnists.

Here’s the truth: there is plenty of money in this country to provide everyone with a good pension and healthcare–for life. It’s simply a question of power and fairness, not affordability. In New York, for example, if we returned to the tax system of the 1970s, 95 percent of the people would get a TAX REDUCTION–and we’d have another $8 billion in the kitty (my colleagues at the Fiscal Policy Institute have made that calculation). That fairer tax structure would bring in enough revenue to fund public employee pensions–and I’d be surprised if a return to a progressive taxation system wouldn’t generate the same result across the country.

So, we have plenty of money–if we actually had a fight over who should be paying taxes and what our damn priorities are. Lopez does acknowledge this indirectly: “A national healthcare plan would be a nice way to get around much of this trouble, but we’ll have a simplified tax code and a Wal-Mart on Jupiter before that happens.”

Lopez has given up. He doesn’t believe we can have real universal healthcare. He’s lowered his own expectations. And once he’s lowered his expectations, he thinks everyone else should, too.

That is part of the dynamic that we saw in the transit strike in New York–some people, who don’t have pensions and health care, felt put out by the workers who risked their jobs to fight for health care and decent pensions.

We need to lift peoples’ expectations.