January 28, 2013 By John G. Dickerson About the Author: John Dickerson is a financial professional living in Mendocino County who is involved in public sector pension analysis and reform. Since 2008 Dickerson has been the publisher of the influential website and newsletter www.YourPublicMoney.com. He focuses on the impact of unfunded pension debt on the...
January 8, 2013 By John G. Dickerson About the Author: John Dickerson is a financial professional living in Mendocino County who is involved in public sector pension analysis and reform. Since 2008 Dickerson has been the publisher of the influential website and newsletter www.YourPublicMoney.com. He focuses on the impact of unfunded pension debt on the...
December 31, 2012 Download Printable Version By William D. Fletcher INTRODUCTION California needs the equivalent of a readable annual report that lets everyone who is interested see how well the state is doing and where it’s headed. Hopefully, this report is a step in that direction. The closest overview available is the State Controller’s Office...
October 3, 2012 If San Jose and San Diego are ground zero for the grassroots battle to reform public sector pensions – in California at least – then Costa Mesa may be ground zero for an even broader public sector reform agenda. Because the city council in Costa Mesa has a majority of members who...
August 29, 2012 Earlier this year the California Policy Center obtained from the city of Anaheim a comprehensive record of all payroll-related disbursements for 2011. This information was provided in the form of a spreadsheet that provided compensation details for every full and part-time employee of the city of Anaheim during 2011. We performed subsequent...
August 10, 2012 On June 5, 2012 the City of San Jose thrust itself into the forefront of the national debate over public sector pensions with its passage of Measure B, a landmark measure that dramatically restructured the pension and retirement benefits of the city’s current employees. Though the internal pressure that led to this...
June 12, 2012 As political scholars and pundits across the nation continue with their post-mortem analysis of the disastrous recall effort against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, one charge that has gained a significant amount of traction has been that the recall campaign against the governor was overwhelmed by the amount of “secret and corporate money”...
May 18, 2012 As reported today in Capitol Weekly, in a post entitled “CalPERS ignores Brown, delays pension payment” by Ed Mendel, the amount taxpayers will have to fork over to CalPERS next year will rise by $213 million, to a total of $3.7 billion. Governor Brown, quite rightly, believes the full amount of the...
April 2, 2012 A concern often voiced by pension reform activists and politicians interested in better understanding pension finance is that they have to depend solely on the information delivered by actuaries. This information, in turn, is typically delivered in a report so voluminous and so technical that the activists and politicians have to hire...
March 23, 2012 In an earlier post, “Public Sector Unions & Political Spending,” we tried to estimate political spending by public sector unions in California. The top-down analysis used was straight-forward and conservative: assume 1.0 million unionized public sector workers, times average dues of $750 per year, times one-third (the proportion of dues used for...
February 24, 2012 When discussing what level of compensation is appropriate and affordable for government workers, it is helpful to make apples-to-apples comparisons between public and private sector workers. In this analysis, the ultimate private sector taxpayer, the self-employed worker, is compared to the typical state or local government employee in California. In both cases,...
January 27, 2012 This week both of California’s largest government employee pension funds, CalPERS and CalSTRS, released their portfolio earnings numbers for the most recent twelve months. In a statement released on January 24th, “CalSTRS Calendar Year-End Investment Returns Show Slight Gains,” CalSTRS disclosed “Investment returns for the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) ended...
December 15, 2011 An analysis we published earlier this year, “Is Union Reform Partisan,” documented the fact that about 95% of political contributions by unions go to the Democratic party. But is corporate political spending is less partisan than union political spending? Equally important, to what extent does corporate political spending outweigh political spending by...
Today’s Wall Street Journal published an article by Phil Izzo entitled “Bleak News for Americans’ Income,” where, citing U.S. Census Data, it was reported that U.S. median household income – adjusted for inflation – fell by 7% over the past ten years. In constant 2010 dollars, the average household in the U.S. saw their income...