Tax Office Glitch Startles Seniors

City Wants More For Vanessa’s Chevy

And, did you see this?

www.johndestefanojr.com

An important piece this article does not mention is the “discount rate” or “Return on Investment” assumptions. When you assume, as New Haven does, a high and unrealistic 8-9% return every year, year after year, you only need to put in a small amount of money AND you can claim that we are “funding the pensions at 100% actuarial required amount”. The problem, is that if you assume 5% then the amount we need to put away in our CERF and P&F funds would skyrocket each year. Our funded ratio is very low AND we assume a high rate of return. I would recommend you request from our actuaries SEVERAL scenarios with the rate of return, pessimistic/ best guess/ optimistic ROI. Our current ROI is hopelessly optimistic and concealing the true problem in our city’s pension funds.

Can New Haven fix its pension problem?

We had a very successful turn out last evening and even won over the people turned out by the Mayor. Lets keep up the pressure to have the Board of Aldermen send the budget back to the Mayor.

Read this article from the New Haven Register.

Background about the story from the New Haven Independent here, here, and here.

If someone is innocent, then they should continue in their job. The possibility of false accusations is a terrible reality for any police officer. That is why we have a judicial system, of which the police are an integral part. If this person is guilty, he should be fired and not given special treatment — which is all too common in New Haven (CJ Cuticello and Billy White). Check out this outrageous practice in Long Isand.

Contact the Board and tell them we want this to stop!

RETIREMENT BOARD – POLICE AND FIRE FUND

• Bishop Theodore L. Brooks, 271 Stevenson Road, New Haven, CT 06515 203-387-3899
• Wendy Mongillo, 12 Oliver Road, New Haven, CT 06515 (203) 387-7948
• Richard Epstein, 59 McKinley Avenue, New Haven, CT 06515 Home Phone: 203-397-2299, Cell Phone: 203-982-4838, email
• John DeStefano, Jr., Ex-Officio Representative, 150 Judwin Ave, New Haven, CT 06515 203-946-7660, email

This program would also encourage people to come and shop in Connecticut since they have a chance to win big for every purchase they make. This would stimulate the economy in addition to increasing reported transactions. Furthermore, you could make this part of a State sales tax increase in an effort to make a sales tax increase more palatable. Since this program would inconvenience retailers and restaurants, give any store that sells a winning ticket a percentage of the winnings. Given the volume of sales of any store or restaurant, they actually will have better odds than most consumers.

The State could hold a drawing on a quarterly or monthly basis. The State could also mail lotto tickets to people who self-report online purchases, bringing in additional dollars from unreported online transactions. The State is already set up to run lotteries so the only new burden would be to print and sell register tapes and sell them to businesses. The cost of doing this could easily be paid for out of increased revenues. While hopefully unnecessary, consumers could even be fined for leaving a store having made a purchase without a receipt if you wanted to enhance reporting and remove incentives to keep transactions off the books.

If you like this idea, please contact one of your state representatives or the governor’s office.