Did CalPERS Fail to Disclose Costs of Historic Bump in Pension Benefits?

By Edward Ring
10/26/2017
How would you feel if someone told you they’d just increased your retirement benefit by 50%, took five years off the age you’d have to be when you could retire and collect this benefit, and then told you there would be almost no additional cost because the stock market was roaring? In California, that’s what...

TAGS: California Public Employees Retirement System, CalPERS, Pacific Grove, SB 400

Court Pension Decision Weakens ‘California Rule’

By Ed Mendel
08/22/2016
The one thing some pension reformers say is needed to cut the cost of unaffordable public pensions: give current workers a less costly retirement benefit for work done in the future, while protecting pension amounts already earned. It’s allowed in the remaining private-sector pensions. But California is one of about a dozen states that have...

TAGS: "California Rule", California Public Employees Retirement System, San Jose mayor Chuck Reed, SB 400, unfunded liability

Pensions and Taxes Increase While Labor Unions go Unchallenged

By Joel Fox
07/18/2016
In January 2015, the Manhattan Institute’s Steve Malanga, writing in the Wall Street Journal about public pension costs gulping down tax raises, quoted me saying that no matter what local politicians tell voters, when you see tax increases, think pensions. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan: Here I go again! Recent accounts indicated that the California Public Employees’...

TAGS: California Public Employees Retirement System, Dan Walters, Steve Malanga

California Pensions Take Above-Average Tax Bite

By Ed Mendel
07/11/2016
California pension funds take a bigger share of tax revenue than the national state average, a research website shows. Why the growing costs are outpacing the norm is not completely clear. A prime suspect for some would be overly generous pensions, particularly what critics say is an “unsustainable” increase for police and firefighters widely adopted...

TAGS: California Public Employees Retirement System, California State Teachers Retirement System, CalPERS, CalSTRS

Union Greed Drives California to Bankruptcy

By Steven Greenhut
04/01/2013
Few non-local people pay much attention to the goings-on in Stockton, a hard-pressed Gold-Rush-era industrial city of 300,000 that sits in the agriculturally rich San Joaquin Valley at the eastern edge of the California Delta. But bondholders, taxpayers and government officials throughout the country will be listening to U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Klein’s expected ruling...

TAGS: California Public Employees Retirement System, San Joaquin Valley, Stockton, Stockton bankruptcy