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Rep Bratcher left this on his fb and closed commenting. So I’d like to help with a basic economics lesson. 1/
1. Most retired teachers stay in the communities they retired from, meaning that the money they draw from pensions goes for the most part back into the local economies. 2/
2. The reason the legislature is having to put so much in now is because the legislature spent the majority of my career, until the last few years, shorting what they owed the system to keep it solvent. 3/
3. Teachers have no choice to pay in 12.9% of every check toward their retirement. Alternatively, ~6% of non-teachers checks are deducted for Social Security. We have no choice in whether we pay in or not, but the state had a choice in how much they contributed 4/
4. Often, because of recessions, they chose to short change our retirement systems to pay for other things the state needed. But now that the bill is due, and the legislature is playing catch up, they wanna balk at how much it costs to make up what they shorted us for years. 5/
5. Last, Rep Bratcher has filed zero revenue generating bills this session that I can find. So clearly he’s subscribed to the philosophy of cutting our way to prosperity (which isn’t a thing, at least not a successful one) 6/
6. So since he hasn’t found a source of new money to help Kentucky, maybe he should quit whining about the over 300 million that Kentucky retired teachers put back in the KY economy. It’s way more than he’s doing as a legislator. Just facts and what not. /7
