Even Jerry Brown knows that government employee pensions have put California in a bad place. Prospects for reform recently took a hit when the Senate Public Employee Retirement Committee killed John Moorlach’s SB 1031 and 1032, which would have let local governments avoid CalPERS termination fees and limited cost-of-living hikes for future employees. The…
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Californians pay the highest income and sales taxes in the United States, and the government recently piled on a $5.2 billion tax on gasoline, diesel fuel and vehicle fees. Taxpayers recently got some clues about what the state will do with all that money. According to the state controller, the state is bulking up…
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The U.S. Supreme Court has dismissed a lawsuit by California’s public employee retirement system against investment banks that supposedly “duped” them into buying some $700 million of stock. CalPERS, the nation’s largest pension trust fund, could have joined a class-action with others but declined to do so. Then CalPERS missed the three-year statute of…
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Taxpayers in the northern California capital region wonder why their roads remain full of potholes, fire stations close down, and overall services decline. As Brad Brannan of the Sacramento Bee explains, this happens because of “rising pension costs.” An employee of the Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District can retire after 30 years, at the age…
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Last year an independent audit revealed that the City of Sacramento, California’s capital, had overpaid city retirees by $2.8 million. The overpayments, which had been going on since 2005, prompted the Sacramento Bee to editorialize that “a mistake can balloon into sizable money,” citing a $60 million gap between projected payouts and expected revenue…
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Rob Feckner, president of the CalPERS board of administration, has heard stories that all is not well with the massive pension fund, with assets of more than $301 billion. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” writes Feckner in the Sacramento Bee. “Let me tell you why.” Investment returns for fiscal year July 1,…
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The whopper government pension of Mike Wiley, outgoing boss of Sacramento Regional Transit, continues to make news, but not just because it draws on the RT operating budget. As Tony Bizjak notes in the Sacramento Bee, Wiley is eligible for a pension of $278,000, a full $48,000 more than Wiley’s final salary of $230,000…
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In California Dreaming: Lessons on How to Resolve America’s Public Pension Crisis, Lawrence McQuillan discovered that California accounts for $550 billion to $750 billion of the $4.7 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities nationwide. The biggest player is the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) which in 1999 assured legislators that its investment earnings would…
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This week voters in California will make the call on, count ‘em, 140 tax increases, from sales taxes to levies on soda and marijuana. If voters should wonder what is driving these tax increases, Mark Bucher of the California Policy Center has a few suggestions in his October 26 Sacramento Bee article headlined “Big…
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“More than a year after Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law he said would tamp down pension spiking,” noted Jon Ortiz in the Sacramento Bee, “the state’s biggest public pension fund is on the verge of adopting rules critics say would undermine its intent.” That pension fund, CalPERS, went on to adopt the new…
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