Free Republic

East St. Louis is short $9.5 million between a budget deficit and back payments owed to its fire and police pensions. As a result, city leaders are closing a firehouse and laying off nine firefighters. Nine firefighters have been asked to hand in their gear and their fire station will temporarily close as East St. Louis, Illinois, faces a $5.5 million budget deficit and interception of nearly $4 million in state funding for debts owed to its police and fire pensions. Unfortunately, with 100% of the City’s state revenues being redirected to the police and fire pensions, we are faced...

U.S. public pension liability is equivalent to $18,300 for every resident. Public pensions can’t afford not to invest in companies that generate impressive growth and profits. If you are a public employee or a retiree, you should be very concerned because new data shows public pension funds that let leftist policies drive their investment decisions, a.k.a. socially responsible investing, have been consistently underperforming their private peers and the general stock markets.Socially responsible investing (SRI), meaning only investing in companies with “ethical” practices, is not an entirely new concept. Public pension funds have been leading in this since the 1970s. For...

While Illinoisans will be paying higher taxes, Gov. J.B. Pritzker says he’s going to give state lawmakers at least a $1,600 pay increase because they’re hard workers. Pritzker said he’ll sign the budget bills being sent his way, despite the ire from taxpayers that lawmakers gave themselves a raise while doubling the state’s gas tax. Pritzker was asked multiple times in Chicago Tuesday if he’d line-item veto more than $280,000 in lawmaker pay increases when he gets the budget that was passed in overtime session. “Look, this was a highly negotiated budget,” Pritzker said. “We had the Republicans and Democrats...

Illinois state government has left the people of the Prairie State quite the stocking stuffer this holiday season: an $11 billion bill backlog that is expected to hit $14 billion by summer 2017. However, with money from a June stopgap funding agreement set to run out by the new year, nonprofit service providers and students receiving state grants may view it more as a lump of coal. Funding for service providers hasn’t been a priority for the General Assembly for quite some time. Service providers wait, on average, nearly a year to be paid. Illinois politicians have been delaying payment...

The mayor of Dallas uses the word “bankruptcy,” and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal swoop in to report on the city’s imminent doom. The mayor of Houston holds a press conference to declare the pension problem solved, and folks just go along with it. The truth is that the two cities are in equally dreadful trouble, headed for bankruptcy, as are Fort Worth and El Paso, thanks to delusional forecasting, ludicrous system design, and meddlesome union-funded lawmakers from across the state who’ve stripped big-city voters of their right to govern their own finances. How mismanaged are these...

the public pension debt for the 50 states and the District of Columbia jumped 84 percent in recent years, from $2.625 trillion in 2008 to $4.833 trillion in 2014. ... The highest pension debt/household is in Alaska, with an estimated $113,137 figure; Illinois and California are in the second and third highest rankings at more than $77,000 per household.” The lowest state pension debt per household is in Tennessee at $17,761. Illinois has the lowest “market funded ratio” (value of pension assets divided by market liability), at 23.3 percent. The other 49 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. have a market...

Pension debt in the Land of Lincoln is a big problem. So big, in fact, that it would take three years of a complete government shutdown, during which the entire general fund went toward pensions, just to break even. No funding for schools, no money for public safety and nothing for health care and human services. Illinois’ unfunded pension liability grew to more than $111 billion this year, according to official estimates. That’s a $48 billion increase just since 2009. ... That $111 billion pension shortfall means the state now has only 39 cents of every dollar it should have...

Scranton could be headed towards another fiscal crisis like the one that resulted in city workers having their pay cut to minimum wage in 2012... Moody’s warned investors that Scranton could be facing the threat of default or bankruptcy thanks to a $20 million budget gap for the fiscal year that begins Jan. 1. The city is supposed to approve a new budget by Nov. 15, which would have to close that deficit to balance the budget. ... A similar crisis hit the city in July 2012, which lead to Mayor Chris Doherty cutting all city workers’ pay to minimum...

The oncoming wave of pension debt is even bigger than it seems. The purpose of this website is to provide an overview of the multiple pension crises that are about to drown America's taxpayers. Our primary focus is on California, but we also track other states, corporate pensions, social security and international trends. PensionTsunami.com is a project of the California Public Policy Center.

Unfunded pension obligations are a "ticking time bomb" for cities and counties across Florida, according to a new report. The report, from researchers at Florida State University, found that local government's have failed to set aside enough money to fund generous pension and health care plans for public employees. Now, as baby-boomers reach retirement, pension obligations are putting a serious strain on already tight municipal budgets. The problem is affecting nearly every large city in Florida. Miami, one of the worst offenders, only set aside $74 million of the $100 million it owed in 2009, the Miami Herald reports. Orlando...

Sutter County pension costs continue to go up millions of dollars each year, requiring more and more of our tax dollars to be spent for employee benefits and on servicing the pension debt thus reducing services to the citizens of Sutter County. If changes are not made, the pension debt will eventually consume most of the county's budget. The latest report from the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) released in October states that Sutter County owes CalPERS $44.8 million as of June 30, 2007. In just six years, from June 2001 to June 2007, Sutter County went from $28.8...