Someone’s aiming to curb those public pension excesses
January 9th, 2008, 6:25 pm · 1 Comment · posted by Mark Landsbaum
From Mark Landsbaum
Former Assemblyman Keith Richman is re-writing an initiative to scale back pension benefits for new public employees. It’s a good thing someone is.
As we learned earlier this week, state government and 1,200 local government agencies face an unfunded liability of $180 billion over the next three decades for those pension and health benefits, which already have been promised to current and former employees. An unfunded liability is a bill that has to be paid, but has no money set aside to pay it.
Every day that passes and every employee added to the payroll worsens the situation.
Richman’s California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility hopes to gather enough signatures to put his measure on the ballot in November. His measure would remove some health care provisions. It also would slash pension pay-outs for new government employees who also qualify for Social Security from 2 percent of pay for each year worked to 1 percent. Those who didn’t qualify for Social Security would get 1.5 percent. To see more detail go here.
Meanwhile, state Controller John Chiang says if the state pre-funds the current retiree obligation, rather than continue on the pay-as-you-go basis, California taxpayers can save $16 billion over the next 30 years.
January 10th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
I doubt Richman will be successful. It’s only until budget cuts occur in programs that will affect people directly that Richman’s ideas will gain acceptance and produce results.
He’d be more successful proposing state oversight over the 1200 local gov’t agencies. The oversight would require local agenices to have a required funding source before any negotiated retirement benefits can be granted.