Albany vet: A Fix to New York Pension Abuse

Long Island Rail Road workers get to use six-figure overtime pay to massively pad their pensions at the public’s expense. But “there is a solution,” says Steve Levy at City and State New York. A 2015 bill proposed by Assemblyman Michael Fitzpatrick “would prohibit overtime payments from being factored into a retiree’s pension calculations.” While modifying pension rules can raise hairy constitutional issues, Levy says, “eliminating overtime or unused sick days from being incorporated into the pension is not fundamental to the pension itself and should not require a constitutional amendment.” Thus, if enacted, the Fitzpatrick bill would save “New York taxpayers a fortune over the next few decades.”

From the right: Trump’s Coming Midwestern Triumph

Democrats determined to prevent a repeat of 2016’s wipeout in the Midwest face an uphill battle, writes Julie Kelly in The New Criterion, because President Trump has delivered for the working-class Midwesterners whose “weathered hands” Hillary Clinton refused to shake. “The unemployment rate is at a 50-year low, overall economic growth is at a pace most experts claimed would never occur and new job creation blows by expectations month after month,” notes Kelly. Then, too, “Trump is tackling unfair international trade agreements that mostly harmed agriculture and manufacturing sectors in the Midwest after decades of neglect.” The result: “The president’s standing in the Midwest now is arguably stronger than it was when he nearly swept the region in 2016,” and “his overall favorability rating is highest in the Midwest.”

Political scribe: Bernie’s Weirdness Is His Whole Charm

Bernie Sanders “is the only living American who never quite got over the ’60s counterculture,” quips The Week’s Matthew Walther, and neither Republicans nor establishment Democrats appreciate that this “weirdness” goes to the heart of the Vermont socialist’s appeal. It means Sanders “isn’t a politician.” Instead, he’s “an avuncular hanger-on” who even hosted a charming, “no-budget clone of ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ ” in the 1980s. His weirdness, Walther notes, extends to “some of Sanders’ policy positions, as well,” which cut against the progressive grain on immigration and guns. These heterodox positions could serve him well, should he become the 2020 Democratic nominee. So “it’s hard to blame him for letting his freak flag fly.”

Conservative: Trump’s Putin Bromance Is Still Weird

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to improve bilateral relations with countries like Russia,” observes The Washington Examiner’s Erin Dunne. “But there’s quite a difference between wanting to improve relations and just blindly taking Russia’s side,” as President Trump too often seems to do. She has in mind Trump’s recent tweet lauding his “long and very good conversation” with Vladimir Putin that touched on Venezuela, Ukraine and arms control, among other matters. Yet “just about everything that Trump included on his list of conversation topics was a bone of contention,” says Dunne, “not something the US president should be agreeing with Russia on. And so the idea of a positive call is ludicrous.” She concludes: “Trump isn’t wrong to talk with Putin, but agreeing with him and eagerly tweeting it about isn’t exactly what the president who claims to be all about protecting our national interest should be doing.”

Science desk: UN Peddles Population Alarmism — Again

The entire food chain is at risk of collapse, and a humanitarian catastrophe looms. That’s the overheated upshot of the latest study from the UN study on biodiversity. Then again, notes Commentary’s Noah Rothman, the United Nations made predictions “at least as terrifying” in 2007. Back then, the body predicted that “up to 55,000 of the estimated 1.9 million species on Earth would disappear every year.” It turned out the study “was based on faulty data, fallacious straight-line projections and a number of assumptions and extrapolations.” As he notes, this new study similarly paints nearly all human activity as unsustainable and reducing human population as the only solution. Bottom line: “No idea should be as discredited as the irrational fear of too many people,” yet this temptation has once more evaded “the stigma it deserves.”

— Compiled by Sohrab Ahmari