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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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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As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, politicians like to spend money on government pensions, for obvious reasons. It reinforces their professional ruling-class status, they are spending other people’s money on themselves, and the spending comes down the line in the future. But in a lingering recession and shrinking economy, articles like this are starting…
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In October we noted that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) had recently defaulted on a $5.6 billion mandate to pre-fund retiree health benefits, the second time in two months the USPS had failed to deliver. In August it failed to make a $5.5 billion retirement prepayment slated for last September, which Congress conveniently deferred….
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Ed O’Keefe reports at the Washington Post that the U.S. government’s postal monopoly continues to hemorrhage red ink at an astounding rate as a result of huge and unsustainable, public-employee-union pension schemes: The U.S. Postal Service reported $2.2 billion in losses during its second quarter, continuing several quarters of historic losses amid declining mail…
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Over at Reason Magazine, Veronique de Rugy illuminates the State Pension problem by drawing attention to the differences in accounting rules applied by the market and the government. As de Rugy notes, states are not required to pony up regular contributions to pension systems and they systematically underestimate the liabilities in pension funds. State…
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Today, President Obama announced that his administration would freeze the pay of federal employees at their current level for two years. Well, that’s a start, if the following chart from Political Calculations showing the relative pay and benefits of federal workers with respect to the average income earner in the private sector is any…
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Despite the threat of another mass labor protest scheduled in France tomorrow, President Sarkozy is promising the modest increase in the standard retirement age from 60 to 62 will pass the legislature. Many of the French protesters are the students and youth—angry because they feel they are entitled to these “social protections”. Young people in the…
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In an incisive, recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Sara Murray reports that: “Efforts to tame America’s ballooning budget deficit could soon confront a daunting reality: Nearly half of all Americans live in a household in which someone receives government benefits, more than at any time in history. “At the same time, the…
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