State Budgets and Pension Costs

The media gets excited over Wall Street’s executive salaries and bonuses. Government is an area that gets only slight attention. We know about Uncle Sam’s spending habits these days. State outlays should get lots of commentary because the tendency to follow Washington is going to become a tremendous source of problems for all states and cities as well.

I am referring to the exorbitant pensions held by about 23 million active and retired state and local public employees. These include city managers, teachers, cops, garbage collectors, guards and others. They represent at least three quarters of public employees who have what is called defined-benefit retirement plans.

They have the ability to organize voters and thus control politicians who keep adding to taxpayer burdens until there are not enough taxpayer funds to go around for the feeding frenzy to persist.