Free Republic

Salem, Ore.-Taxpayer-funded pension systems are combustible by nature, but Oregon's ticking time bomb known as PERS is on the brink of exploding. Among the impending disaster's collateral damage, Republicans say, will be public workers and kids if so-called "progressive" Democrats are allowed to dodge the hard work of diffusing the PERS bomb. Under Oregon's one-party-rule taxpayers are now on the hook for an estimated $52,100,000,000 in taxpayer-held pension debt. Simply put, to avoid getting smacked with an Illinois-like credit rating of near "junk" status, late last Friday the PERS Board adjusted the taxpayer funded-pension system's (PERS) assumed investment earnings rate,...

CARSON CITY — A state lawmaker pushing for major changes to the state public employee retirement plan told a committee Wednesday that long-term workers would do better under his proposal than with the current defined-benefit pension plan. Assemblyman Randy Kirner, R-Reno, testified in support of his Assembly Bill 190 in front of the Ways and Means Committee. The bill would establish a new hybrid retirement plan for public employees hired as of July 1, 2016. The bill is fiercely opposed by public employee groups who argue the existing Public Employees Retirement System plan is well-managed and does not need to...

Epicenter Of A Bursting Bubble Dave Gonigam Jun 5, 2013 “Josephine County is broke,” wrote the commenter at Huffington Post. “Armed citizen volunteers have taken over most patrol duties against the wishes of Sheriff Gilbertson.” Washington, D.C., is flush with new tax revenue… and Wall Street is riding high with the big stock indexes near record highs. Meanwhile, in places far from the centers of power, we’re seeing one of our forecasts play out. Now nearly two years old, we said the “mother of all financial bubbles” would make itself felt first on the local level. Josephine County, Ore. —...

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...

The actuary for Oregon's Public Employee Retirement System confirmed Friday what is already a common-knowledge piece of the state's looming budget shortfall: the cost of funding PERS will increase sharply in 2011. As of Dec 31, the retirement system had 76 cents in assets for every $1 in liabilities, excluding prepaid contributions. The system's investments declined about 1 percent year through May 31, Mercer said. If they finish the year at this level, the system's overall funded status, excluding prepaid contributions, will decline to about 70 percent

REGION: County's pension costs soar Finance chief says taxpayers' additional liability now $119 million By JEFF ROWE - Staff Writer | Saturday, April 18, 2009 5:08 PM PDT ∞ RIVERSIDE ---- As the county grapples with ways to cut costs in response to shrinking revenue, it now faces a $119 million pension expense that will further complicate balancing its budget. That's on top of the approximately $150 million the county will contribute this year as its normal share of its employees' pension. The declining stock market has eroded county employees' retirement portfolios. Terms of the county's contract with the California...

The State of Illinois has the most underfunded public pension plans in the nation, with a funding gap that is now approaching $50 billion. The low balances in the state's pension accounts have been made worse by the stock market crash, which has also hit Chicago's and Cook County's employee pension plans. Here's a look at the dire situation for the retirement plans of state workers ranging from police to judges to university professors to members of the Illinois General Assembly. All are counting on generous state pensions, but may soon wake up to a brutal reality. A financial war...

Governors from Tennessee to Idaho have ordered deep cuts in spending as the recession continues to ravage state budgets. Can broad-based tax increases be far behind? State fiscal experts say the stage could be set for a wave of rises in state sales and personal-income taxes more widespread than any since the early 1990s. "My view is that cuts will become significant and touch enough people that tax increases will be more viable than they have been in the past," says Scott Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers in Washington. Taxpayers in most states escaped...

The front page of Wednesday's Wall Street Journal featured a shocking news story about severe financial problems in the public employees union-dominated California Public Employees' Retirement System, which has lost a quarter of its assets since July after investing heavily in real estate schemes — including high-risk speculative ventures on vacant land. According to the Journal, CalPERS has experienced its worst decline since 1932 and has lost 103 percent on its housing investments in the latest fiscal year. Here's the kicker: “CalPERS invested not only its own money, but billions of dollars of borrowed money that must be repaid even...

Washington is short on cash these days and will borrow every dime of the $150 billion to $300 billion for the "stimulus" bill now being worked on. Federal appetites may know no bounds. But the federal government's ability to borrow is not limitless. Already, our nation's unfunded liabilities total $52 trillion -- about $450,000 per household. There's something very strange about issuing debt to solve a problem caused by too much debt.

$400 million stock loss by California government retirement funds and the mask of our parasitic courts The California Public Employee Retirement System (Cal-PERS) seeks to recover a $400 million stock loss by suing AIG for alleged accounting "improprieties." Suing the private sector for losses sustained on bad investments or during price bubbles and using the redistributionist courts to demonize and shake down the private sector for their losses has become an all-too-frequent tactic of government. The legalized leaching of the private sector by our court system masks as cases of fraud, white collar crime, tort claims, etc. The ancient Greek...