Free Republic

When San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White retired after 15 years leading the department, she joined the ranks of a growing financial elite — the 139 former city workers collecting pensions of more than $200,000 a year. Most are former police and firefighter brass, and some are making more in retirement than they did when working. And it’s not only in San Francisco. Hayes-White is receiving a pension of $311,560 a year, with cost of living increases of 2% or more each year. “To put these high pensions into perspective, a guaranteed $200,000 annual pension for 25 years would require...

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...

Will people have to postpone - or cancel - retirement? Why is Pelosi not being asked this question?

Rahm Emanuel raised taxes to get city worker pension funds on a ‘path to solvency.’ The shortfall still ballooned by $7 billion. ... A record-high property tax increase. A new tax on water and sewer service. A higher 911 emergency fee on telephone lines... Emanuel’s series of tax hikes was painful, but he promised the extra money was part of a plan to get the woefully underfunded city worker pension funds on a “path to solvency.”.. in the four years since .. The pension funds are actually worse off. When Emanuel pushed through the tax hikes, the city worker retirement...

Forty U.S. states do not have enough money to pay all their bills primarily due to significant unfunded pensions or Other-Post-Employment Benefits (OPEB). Truth in Accounting (TIA), a nonpartisan, not-for-profit has been monitoring the financial health of states for a decade in order to educate taxpayers about the financial health of their states today released its tenth annual Financial State of the States.

he money is going to pensions and health care.” The comments underscore the persistent fiscal pressure on New Jersey, a high-tax state contending with massive debts to employee pension funds after years of failing to set aside enough to cover the $212 billion of benefits that have been promised.

The nation is more than a decade past the Great Recession, and most places are seeing a strong economic recovery and improved living standards. Not in Chicago, and not in Illinois. August statistics from the National Association of Realtors noted the city and state’s real estate market has severely underperformed, a trend forecasted to continue in the third quarter of this year. While the Midwest and the nation as a whole saw a very minor dip in home sales and surging Midwest home prices, Chicago missed the wave. Home sales in the Windy City experienced a 13.3% plunge, and the...

About 1.3 million Americans could have their retirement funds at risk if Congress can't come up with the money to pay the benefits people were promised. That is because a number of multiemployer pension plans are on the brink of running out of money. This week, Congress took a stab at solving the problem with the markup of the Rehabilitation for Multiemployer Pensions Act. Though it garnered far less attention than the testimony of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who was on Capitol Hill talking about interest rates and the economy, it was no less important. Retirees' financial futures hang...

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...

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Wednesday said there’s “no question” residents will need to pay more in taxes or fees to plug a looming city budget shortfall estimated at more than $700 million. Lightfoot made the comment, without elaborating on specifics, after her second City Council meeting, when she was asked about a campaign promise to find budget cuts before seeking a property tax increase. ... There’s no question we’re going to have to come to the taxpayers and ask for additional revenue ... Lightfoot took office last month facing a gaping budget hole in the next fiscal year ......

Without pension reform, progressive income tax amendment guarantees tax hikes on Illinois’ middle class. ( Full title). The current progressive income tax proposal would fail to pay down the state's unfunded liability while damaging Illinois' economy. On May 20, Democrats in the Illinois House Revenue & Finance Committee approved Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s prized progressive tax constitutional amendment. While the Senate had previously passed a new income tax structure – already different from the governor’s original proposal – the House Committee also passed the amendment without putting in income tax rates. ... progressive tax proponents need to face that without pension...

​”​This is about stealing. This is about fraud. This is about people saying they work and charging the taxpayers when they didn’t work. It’s stealing. It’s criminal​,” the governor said during a news conference at his midtown Manhattan office. “​So this has nothing to do with overtime. It has to do with theft and fraud, and that’s criminal.​”​ ...Recently retired LIRR employee Thomas Caputo claimed he worked an additional 3,864 hours to rake in $344,147 in overtime pay in 2018 for a grand paycheck of $461,646, according to the Empire Center. Another LIRR worker, Marco Pazmino, put in for 4,157...

The City of Oakland is in such dire financial straits that it is planning to use $2.9 million from state gas tax revenues to keep the city’s lights on, rather than using the money to fix pothole-riddled roads, for which the funding was intended. The San Francisco Chronicle reported Wednesday that the city is facing severe financial shortfalls, despite a booming economy that has seen wealthier households relocate from San Francisco across the bay to gentrifying neighborhoods. The problem is that the city’s costs are rising faster than its growing revenues, thanks partly to pension obligations — an increasingly common...

In a reminder of the extent and reality of California’s pension problem, the state’s six-figure pension club has more doubled since 2012. ... the number of retirees from the California Public Employees’ Retirement System who received pensions worth $100,000 or more rose from 14,760 in 2012 to 30,969 in 2018. average pension for full-career state employees enrolled in the plan for non-public safety workers was $63,057. For full-career state retirees enrolled in the plan for safety members, the average pension in 2018 was $84,197. For those working for local government employers, the average pension for regular employees was $74,599 in...

A new report by the Transport Workers Union says that airlines are increasingly performing heavy maintenance in foreign countries, limiting the number of aircraft maintenance jobs in the U.S. The report said that approximately 24% of heavy aircraft maintenance is performed offshore, up from about 7% in 2003. The report includes estimates that U.S. airlines spend about $2 billion annually on maintenance work in South America, China and Europe, an amount that could otherwise be spent on an estimated 8,200 jobs for U.S. mechanics. Foreign outsourcing “creates an unnecessary and devastating economic impact on future generations,” said John Samuelsen, president...

It may not be the biggest state, nor the one with the most students, but Illinois leads the nation in school district spending on administrators. Even amid a looming statewide financial crisis, the state’s 852 districts spent more than $1 billion in fiscal year 2016, the most in the nation ... Illinois also spends twice as much per pupil on school administration as the national average — $544 in Illinois to $226 nationwide. Measured per pupil, that is the third highest rate in the country, nearly double New York at $349 and nearly five times as much as California, where...

Nearly one-third of the employees who retired from the MBTA last year were under the age of 55, and dozens were still in their 40s, adding to the flow of younger retirees state lawmakers had hoped to stem years ago. The Legislature passed a law in 2009 intended to dial back a lavish public sector perk at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, but because it only applied to new hires, many employees retiring now still fall under the old rules — and potentially collect pensions for longer than they actually worked at the T. In all, nearly 200 employees retired...

Turns out Congressmen make a lot of money... A study found that while the average American’s net worth increased 3.7% per year between 2004-2012, members of Congress averaged 15.4% annual gains. That high level of pay means half the members of Congress are millionaires today… and continue to collect their $174,000 annual salary. Of course it’s you, the taxpayer, paying that cushy salary. But did you know the taxpayer also foots the bill for insane retirement benefits for Congress? Each retired member can start collecting a pension at age 62 if they’ve spent just five years in Congress. And they’ll...

FRANKFORT - A raucous crowd of Kentucky teachers who skipped school to show their disdain for a bill that would alter how members of the Teachers’ Retirement System Board of Trustees are selected was not enough to deter a panel of House lawmakers from approving the bill Thursday on a party-line vote. House Bill 525 would change the nominating process for board member, moving the nominations away from the Kentucky Education Association and spreading them among eight eduction-related professional groups. “I know of no other board, created by statute, that has its membership controlled almost entirely by one private organization,”...

For each active worker, four pensioners. For 169 governmental bodies, the numbers are lopsided. In some cases hundreds — and in Chicago’s case, thousands — more retirees are drawing from a fund than active workers are paying into it. Even in a small suburban district such as the Arlington Heights Park District, 432 retirees are pulling from that district’s pension fund with only 103 active employees paying into it. In the city of Chicago, according to the treasurer’s numbers, the gap is smaller in percentage terms, but in terms of the gap, more dramatic. Including Chicago Board of Education administrative...