Pensions | California Policy Center

CalPERS is shocked – just shocked – to find cities reeling under the burden of growing pension debt

Sacramento The California Public Employees’ Retirement System’s union defenders feign shock whenever pension reformers accuse it of “kicking the can down the road” in dealing with the state’s mounting pension debt. It’s like the scene from Casablanca, when Captain Louis Renault is absolutely shocked to find gambling going on in a gambling house. CalPERS is...

By Steven Greenhut

In good times and in bad, California’s pension fund managers win fat bonuses

Sacramento — California’s top pension funds have suffered through a few cycles of bleak investment returns and plummeting funding ratios, so we can’t blame them for wanting to celebrate after what was, relatively speaking, a stellar financial year. But the manner in which they chose to celebrate was shocking. The funds gave their top officials...

By Steven Greenhut

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

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...

By Edward Ring

How Can Local Officials Prepare for the Upcoming Janus vs AFSCME Ruling?

“A public employer shall provide all public employees an orientation and shall permit the exclusive representative, if applicable, to participate.” – Excerpt from California State Assembly Bill AB 52, December 2016 In plain English, AB 52 requires every local government agency in California to bring union representatives into contact with every new hire, to “allow...

By Edward Ring

Coping With the Pension Albatross

Instead of the cross, the albatross About my neck was hung. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798 In Coleridge’s famous poem, a sailor who killed an albatross has it hung around his neck as punishment. Since then, the albatross, which sailors used to consider good luck, has come to symbolize an oppressive...

By Edward Ring

Forget the scary pension future; study confirms the crisis is hitting now

Sacramento — Debates about California’s pension crisis almost always focus on the big numbers – the hundreds of billions of dollars (and, by some estimates, more than $1 trillion) in unfunded liabilities that plague the public-pension funds. For instance, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System is only 68 percent funded – meaning it only has...

By Steven Greenhut

Marin County Discloses Debt Balances on Property Tax Bills

How would you like it if every time you received a property tax bill from your county assessor, you also received a notice that disclosed the amount of the county’s total debt, annual operating expenses, total unfunded liability for pensions, and total unfunded liability for retirement healthcare? You might not like it, but you’d have...

By Edward Ring

Seattle’s Minimum Wage: Bad Hygiene and Lower Wages

California’s minimum wage is set to gradually increase to $15 by 2022, following in the footsteps of minimum wage pioneer city Seattle. Unfortunately, the unintended consequences of Seattle’s minimum wage experiment are starting to show, both in deteriorating restaurant quality and in decreasing wages for low-income workers. According to the latest study, Seattle’s 2016 minimum...

By California Policy Center

Cities facing fiscal mess plead with CalPERS as pensions consume local budgets

Sacramento – If you ask the union-controlled California Public Employees’ Retirement System about the state’s looming pension crisis, you’re likely to get this answer: What pension crisis? But the story was much different at CalPERS’ own Finance and Administration Committee meeting held Sept. 19. City officials from across California warned CalPERS board members about the...

By Steven Greenhut

California’s soaring poverty rates tied to its fiscal irresponsibility

Sacramento The U.S. Census Bureau’s latest statistics, released this month, find that California’s poverty rate remains the highest in the nation, despite dipping ever so slightly. The reason is no surprise: It’s tied largely to the state’s unusually high cost of living. Yet despite Democratic lawmakers’ oft-stated concern about rising income inequality, they spent the...

By Steven Greenhut

Pension Reform – The San Jose Model

Pension reform in San Jose began in June 2012 when voters, by a margin of 69% to 31%, approved Measure B. Despite overwhelming support from voters, however, this vote triggered a cascade of union funded lawsuits which by 2015 had overturned several of the key provisions of the reform measure. Finally, in August 2015, the...

By Edward Ring

Deputies’ pension and pay deals driving ‘contract’ cities to financial brink

Sacramento More than a decade ago, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department offered a good value to cities that wanted to provide police services without having to operate their own departments. However, years of excessive salary and pension increases have driven up the costs of the contracts and could drive cities toward the brink of bankruptcy....

By Steven Greenhut

TAPped out: The method to CalPERS’ madness toward tiny Sierra County city

Sacramento — Observers have wondered in recent months why the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the nation’s largest state pension fund and one of Wall Street’s most muscular financial players, has taken such a hamfisted approach toward one of California’s tiniest and least-powerful cities. There’s a rational, albeit troubling, reason for its approach. After the...

By Steven Greenhut

California fiscal outlook remains grim

California’s state government collected $2.68 billion less in revenues than expected during the 2016-17 fiscal year. The bad news will likely worsen California’s position relative to other states: After crunching 2015 data for fiscal conditions in all fifty states, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University ranks California 43rd. While we rank a relatively strong...

By David Schwartzman