Cola tastes good, but COLA ruins pensions? Colorado House Republicans on Housing Affordability. What do you think about revegetating? Rewilding with plants?
Cola tastes good, but COLA ruins pensions?
I thought the op-ed linked below was interesting and wanted to share. As someone who will likely finish his teaching career as a member of PERA, I like to keep a weather eye on public pension issues. Whether you are also a member of PERA (or other public pension) or not, you get to fund them, possibly bail them out too, so it's something that we should all stay up on.
I'll leave it to you to read the op-ed, but one of author's main points here is the problem created by automatic Cost of Living Adjustments (COLAs) in defined benefit** pensions.
Whether it's your reality or something you have to use your imagination for, it's not too hard to understand how inflation drives increases in the cost of living. For someone still working, the thinking goes, it's not as harmful because wages tend to rise with inflation and there are ways for those still working to earn extra income.
Not so for those who've retired and are living on a fixed income. Without a solid way to increase their income, rising prices really pinch.
The op ed gives some history on how policymakers have responded to this problem. Quoting:
"Up until the inflation of the 70s, most public pensions were in relatively good shape. They provided modest benefits under mostly predictable conditions. But the inflation of the late 60s and 70s led to political pressure to tie benefits to price increases. In 1972, President Nixon signed COLAs into law for Social Security beginning in 1975. Around the same time, public pensions began doing something similar to ease the effects of inflation on pensioners. While studies show the COLAs didn’t keep pace with inflation, they were enough to start setting some of those pension funds behind, and their limited success was enough to keep them in place long enough to store up financial trouble."
Mr. Sharf, the author and a member of one of PERA's advisory committees, goes on to then discuss how COLAs have often harmed the overall security and stability of defined benefit pensions and argues for why Colorado's Police and Fire pensions should not be instating automatic COLAs for their pension.
I gather, though I've not had a chance to email to ask, that the author here is not against COLAs per se, but rather that his concern is over automatic (and thus thoughtless) increases in pension benefits.
That seems a reasonable stance to me. This is particularly the case when a pension getting into serious trouble could end up causing a problem for all of us and not just those in the pension.
I also think that Sharf's position would be an easier sell to people than trying to convince pensioners and others that there should be no cost of living increase: when is the last time anyone was in support of less money (this goes double for older people who tend to be more consistent voters).
The firefighter and police pension fund would be an interesting case study depending on what they decide to do. Defined benefit pensions are tough because people are living longer and still retiring at roughly the same ages, a set up almost sure to be problematic. As I alluded to above, their decision has the potential not just to affect them, but us all because if they start running into problems, you can bet they won't be meekly living with what they did.
They'll be clamoring for us as taxpayers to bail them out.
**Just in case, broadly there are two different types of pensions. Defined contribution pensions. This is much more common now. You pay in a certain amount monthly and the money is invested and saved. It grows and when you retire, the account is now something you get and can draw down. When it's gone it's gone. The other type is defined benefit, something that was more common in years past. You pay a certain amount monthly and then when you retire you get a certain amount every month until you die. Die in a year or in 30, the money keeps coming in. As you might imagine, this latter type has gotten much more costly as people have lived longer.
https://completecolorado.com/2025/05/26/resist-destabilizing-colorado-police-fire-pensions/
Colorado House Republicans on Housing Affordability.
A reader recently shared something from the Colorado State House Republicans which I thought I'd share.
It's a paper on housing affordability in Colorado (among a couple of related items). They spell out the part environmental policy has played in making housing more costly and/or how it has reduced supply.
I thought you might find the housing parts interesting so they are shared below as a quote (so that you can follow links and/or footnotes) and also as screenshots 1 and 2 to save space.
Give the below a look and then look at screenshots 1 and 2 attached. I'm not so sure that what you will see here is 100% of the answer, but I am convinced that the policy in this state has been a part of the problem, from the simple standpoint that the House Republicans have it below: when you restrict supply, when you add regulation, prices go up and fewer people want to enter the market.
THE COST OF HOUSING – ECONOMICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT
When it comes to the supply of housing, according to a November 2023 report from the Denver Post, Colorado faces a shortfall of 100,000 houses and apartments; at least one source put the number higher, at 127,000.
Since the 2008 financial crisis new home building in Colorado is 46% lower than the annual average in the 8 years leading up the recession. If Colorado were to return to the average housing-to-population ratio between 1986 and 2008 it would require an additional 175,000 housing units across the state today.
To close that gap and meet the future population needs Colorado will need to develop 54,190 new housing units annually over the next five years.1
It is axiomatic in economics that there’s an inverse relationship between supply and demand when it comes to pricing: when supply exceeds demand, prices go down; when demand exceeds supply, prices go up. In Colorado, the demand for housing exceeds supply and thus prices have gone up.
THE COST OF HOUSING – GOVERNMENT POLICIES HAVE RESULTED IN HIGHER PRICES
And then there’s the issue of cost or affordability: Americans are less optimistic than ever about the prospects of owning a home – in a recent survey 38% of renters – nearly two in five -thought they’d never be able to own a home, mainly on account of high costs.2
Worse yet, a 2024 Denver Post article observed that only 6% of homes sold in early 2023-24 were affordable to a family earning the median household income of ~$99,000 per year.3
Overall, since 2013 the average cost of an average home in terms of hours worked per month has gone up 170% according to the recent report from the Common Sense Institute.4
In 2013 one full-time worker in a household could pay for the cost of housing; now, even 2 full-time workers don’t earn enough.
Democrats claim that government intervention and the wise policies of the elite can lower costs – but in truth, when Democrat ‘masterminds’ intervene, housing costs increase.
According to a recent report from the National Association of Homebuilders, government regulations in Colorado account for 24% – or about about $141,000 – of the average home price of $589,000.5
For multifamily housing, regulatory costs were far higher at about 41% of project costs.6
Some regulations are essential for health and safety, but many others are simply the result of Democrat efforts to create utopia – and just as expected, housing costs continue to increase. In addition, the fiscal policies of the Biden Administration resulted in inflation; mortgage interest rates doubled between 2021 and 2024.7
On top of that, there’s the matter of property taxes: homeowners face an estimated cumulative property tax increase of 32%-54% from now until 2026. How will families cope?
1 Per: https://commonsenseinstituteco.org/co-housing-blueprint/.
2 At: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/bidens-america-40-renters-think-theyll-never-own-home-27-last-year.
3 https://www.denverpost.com/2024/05/04/colorado-housing-competitiveness-affordability-denver/.
4 See: https://commonsenseinstituteco.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/CSI-Report-CO-Property-Tax-2.pdf.
5 As of 2021, 24% of a house’s cost was due to regulatory compliance (https://www.nahb.org/-/media/NAHB/news-and-economics/docs/housingeconomics-plus/special-studies/2021/special-study-government-regulation-in-the-price-of-a-new-home-may-2021.pdf?rev=29975254e5d5423791d6b3558881227b).
6 https://www.nmhc.org/globalassets/research--insight/research-reports/cost-of-regulations/2022-nahb-nmhc-cost-of-regulations-report.pdf.
7 https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/historical-mortgage-rates/
What do you think about revegetating? Rewilding with plants?
I had a reader send me the CNYW (County News Your Way -- a SE Colorado local news org*) about a Bent County Farm, AV Farms, trying to get a change to their initial permit from the county. The meeting drew quite a few people by the looks of the article.
I'll leave it to you to read up on the details of the permit etc. There is some local concern here (skepticism perhaps being more apt?) given one of the principals involved. If you read the story and/or watch the video, you'll see that the farm manager is a gentleman named Karl Nyquist. This is the same gentleman behind a water deal with the Springs that rubbed some growers the wrong way. The background on that is in the Colorado Politics story linked second below.
I don't live there, I'm not familiar with AV Farms, and I don't know the people involved, so I will leave that where it is.
What I wanted to put out there for comment/thought is an issue tangential to the permit. I'd love to have those more experienced than me chime in.
The question that set my brain working here was the feasibility of revegetating land that's dried out (this being something AV Farms is struggling with--they want to revegetate some land that hasn't been in production for a while due to a lack of rain to feed dairy cattle).
This is especially relevant in areas in Southeast Colorado where land has gone fallow and/or, thanks to water buy up deals, the corners of fields which are now dry due to a switch from flood irrigation to center pivot irrigation. If at some point, that land were to be put back into some sort of meaningful production, how feasible is that process?
Let's go further. What about an attempt to get the soil back to the condition it was prior to the arrival of mass European settlement?
If I had to bet, I'd say the former is challenging under the best of conditions. Getting dry bare soil to fill in with plants of any kind (other than weeds of course) is a challenge. The latter? I can't even imagine, save to say that it would be costly and years in the making (the grasslands weren't built in a day the first go 'round).
I'm not willing to go the Full Monty and say that soil is a "living being", but I am willing to say that it is an ecosystem unto itself; it's not just dirt. Anything done in the past to change that (say cultivating the land from its natural state followed by drying it out) leaves a mark and changes the dynamics of that ecosystem.
Changing that back to a cultivated state will require time and money so that both the soil and any compatible plants can live long enough to re-establish their former relationship.
The other dynamic is that all plants, even those tolerant of less water, need water when planting or sowing on top of (at least in my experience with xeric plants and grasses) probably two good years of favorable conditions to be established. Only then are they strong enough to survive tough conditions on their own.**
If AR Farms is on the level here and trying to get some Ag operations down there back up and running, I support the effort and wish them luck. I hope for them to get a few years of favorable precipitation, God knows SE Colorado has needed it for some time!
What do you think?
*I don't know much about their coverage, but you know my penchant for hyperlocal news. If you live in SE Colorado, you might want to give them a follow, in keeping with a focus on acting locally and reading widely.
**Sometimes longer in tougher conditions. If you're curious for an example, look up "nurse plants" for cacti in the wild.