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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Back in 1999, under governor Gray Davis, the State of California boosted pensions and allowed most government employees to retire at the age of 55. This led to a surge of unfunded liabilities, and even Jerry Brown pushed for minor reforms. State employees hired after January 1, 2013, would have to work to…
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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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Taxpayers prone to wonder why government is so wasteful should take a hard look at government-employee pensions in general and the practice of double-dipping in particular. As this report notes, Bill Carnahan, head of the Southern California Public Power Authority, took both his full-time salary and his pension at the same time, and he…
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In a new article in the Financial Times, Nicole Bullock reports that a huge pension deficit of more than half a trillion dollars for 50 U.S. cities may produce calls for a massive federal bailout: “Big US cities could be squeezed by unfunded public pensions as they and counties face a $574 billion funding…
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