Let's say your local city council met, plopped down and approved a budget that outlined every expenditure for the next 20 years, increasing spending with each year based upon projected growth. Would you believe the next city council would be bound by that budget?
If the answer is no, then why would that same city council be bound to some budgeted retirements and benefits some council put in decades ago (or even last year?)
Let's state how deep the pit is, for example, in California. When the dot com bust happened in the stock market, CALPERs, the public employee pension fund, lost quite a bit of money (the state and many cities were deeply involved in investing retirement money in ‘California companies’, many of which were overinflated.) The way CALPERs works is that it is assumed that a certain percentage of return will come each year (in the case back then, the expected return was 8%.) Each city is obligated to make up whatever percentage of the expected return doesn't occur - so in that particular era, when CALPERs had a return of -28%, that meant that every city was obligated to pay half again what they had already contributed to the pension funds.
But this is brilliant... Knowing that cities didn't have funds to repay that shortfall (and mismanagement of public funds), CALPERs said that cities only had to pay back the expected interest on that lost money. Oh, heck, call it all lost money - just pay the interest, and everything will be just fine.
You literally have cities issuing bonds in California to pay the interest on CALPERs debt from 16 years ago. And even more fascinating, you have electorates approving those bonds.
So when your local city council says ‘we don't have money to pay to keep the library open’, what they really mean is ‘We're still paying off debts from nearly two decades ago which we had no say in, plus making new debts as again CALPERs fell short of the projected rate of return, and thus we're spending all your cash on paying for former employees.’
A nice start would be RICO charges against CALPERs and enablers for embezzlement of public funds. Either way, it is a pyramid scheme which they are leveraging against the value of your property. Guess how this is going to play out.
Would you believe the next city council would be bound by that budget?
This happens in every board room of every company in the world. Regardless of what took place in the past you need to set a budget for the future. If bad decisions were made in the past cap it. Pay off what you owe but don’t let any new people on board. If you can’t handle tough decisions then you are not fit for the job. Stop giving the city council a break and letting them blame the past council.