Free Republic

The new ‘minimum wage’ for government work is now $100,000+... So, just who is making all of this money? Meet the Illinois government employee $100,000 Club. It's comprised of 132,188 public employees and retirees who earned a new ‘minimum wage’ of $100,000 or more. While crime skyrockets in the neighborhoods, test scores plummet in the public schools, and inflation decimates private-sector paychecks, the Illinois public employee class is living the good life. Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found nearly 500 educators in the public schools with salaries between $200,000 and $439,000. In small towns, city managers made up to $341,300. Three...

Unfunded state pension liabilities have climbed to $8.28 trillion, or nearly $25,000 for every person in the United States, according to a new report from the American Legislative Exchange Council.The American Legislative Exchange Council released the latest edition of its report on pensions in all 50 states Thursday. The report, "Unaccountable and Unaffordable 2021," shows just a handful of states with outsize pension liabilities account for a large share of overall pension debt in the U.S.The report looked at 290 state-administered government pension plans and their assets and liabilities from fiscal year 2012 to fiscal year 2020. An example of...

Earlier today the Kersten Institute for Governance and Public Policy highlighted an updated pension study, released by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, which revealed some fairly startling realities about California's public pension underfunding levels. After averaging $77,700 per household in 2014, the amount of public pension underfunding for the state of California jumped to a staggering $92,748 per household in 2015. But don't worry, we're sure pension managers can grow their way out of the problem...hedge fund returns have been stellar recently, right? Stanford University’s pension tracker database pegs the market value of California’s total pension debt at...

(CNSNews.com) -- The U.S. has a $210 trillion “fiscal gap” and “may well be in worse fiscal shape than any developed country, including Greece,” Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff told members of the Senate Budget Committee in written and oral testimony on Feb. 25. “The first point I want to get across is that our nation is broke,” Kotlikoff testified. “Our nation’s broke, and it’s not broke in 75 years or 50 years or 25 years or 10 years. It’s broke today. "Indeed, it may well be in worse fiscal shape than any developed country, including Greece," he said. (See...

Many Americans didn't bother to vote in the past presidential election, some out of apathy or a belief that the election would hardly affect them. They are in for a rude awakening now that Obama has won re-election. His Santa Claus false promises are unsustainable, so there are going to be few winners and a lot of losers as he redistributes wealth. Obama ran on a platform of making the rich “pay their fair share of taxes,” but raising taxes on the wealthy will only fund the federal government for eight days a year. In order to even partially keep...

The pension funds for state and local workers in the United States are understating the amount they will owe workers by $1.5 trillion or more, according to some economists who have studied the issue, meaning that the benefits are much costlier than many governments and taxpayers thought. Doubts about government pension accounting have been voiced by analysts for years, but with shortfalls in state and local pension plans exacerbated by the recession, the push to refigure pension fund shortfalls has gained political momentum. The trillion-dollar gap arises from the government method of accounting, which several experts say significantly underestimates the...

Just one in five U.S. pension plans has enough assets to meet obligations, a state of affairs caused largely by overly optimistic projections of investment returns that points to a range of possible scenarios, from changing benefits to pensions going broke, according to a study from Cogent Research. About 54 percent of public pensions say their current funding status is below 80 percent of what is necessary to meet their obligations, and 16 percent of the pensions are below 60 percent of what they’ll need, according to Cogent’s “Institutional Investor Brandscape” study. This shortfall is even more acute among the...

General Motors shored up its underfunded pension plans Friday by giving them 60.6 million shares of common stock worth roughly $2 billion. It's in addition to $4 billion in cash that the company paid the plans in December. THE PROBLEM: At the end of 2009, the last time the plans were valued, GM's pensions inside and outside the U.S. were $27.4 billion short of their obligations.

An Interview with Christina Asquith: About “The Emergency Teacher” Tuesday, November 8, 2005 EducationNews.org Suzi Cottrell Michael F. Shaughnessy Eastern New Mexico University Portales, New Mexico 1) You have recently written a book about “The Emergency Teachers” What prompted you to write this book? Literature is a powerful teaching tool. When I started my first year teaching in a low-income, urban school, I searched for books by other new teachers to use as a model for myself. But I couldn’t find anything that was realistic and written by a teacher. So, when my year ended, and I had learned so...

United retirees lament broken promises, shattered dreams. Ellen Saracini lost her husband, United Airlines Capt. Victor J. Saracini, when his Flight 175 crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Now she stands to lose more than half of her widow's pension in a very different kind of crash — United's default of its $9 billion pension obligations. The scale of the default, the largest in U.S. history, has until now received more attention than the toll on the lives of the bankrupt airline's 120,000 employees and pensioners. Saracini discussed its impact on her and her two daughters...

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) - National parks in California are so underfunded and understaffed that they've eliminated educational programs and are turning away thousands of children each year. According to a study this week from the National Parks Conservation Association, roughly 80,000 kindergartners through 12th graders participate in educational programs each year at parks such as Joshua Tree, Yosemite and Lassen Volcanic. That amounts to only 1 percent of the state's 7 million public and private school students. "Part of providing a high-quality education to our children is ensuring access to the unique learning opportunities in our national parks," said Deborah...