patrick.net

According to a 2014 Pew study, only 15 states follow policies that have funded at least 100% of their pension needs.

DEmocrats version of socialism-make the family that amkes 30-50k a year pay the pensions of people making 70-100k+ a year for shuffling papers. Just like obamacare-dems vision of america-either rich or poor-middle class-F. U.

Blurtman says

According to a 2014 Pew study, only 15 states follow policies that have funded at least 100% of their pension needs.

Article fails to mention which 15.

California cities that went bankrupt the first time are now contemplating bankruptcy again ie. Vallejo. One of my neighbors worked on the Stockton bankruptcy, and the only thing they cared about was preserving pensions while shafting everything else. Because unsustainable pensions are THE glaring problem, it just cut services and kicked the can down the road for another bankruptcy.

Families making 30-50k a year aren't paying the pensions of anyone in IL. If they have kids they're likely not paying any state income tax and if they are the amount is negligible in the big picture, probably under $500 annually. I paid about $7k last year in IL income taxes. I know of at least 4 close friends or family members that pay close to the same amount that have left the state. Not just across the border, straight up went long distance and no where near the region. So complete and total tax dollar loss for IL.

Families making 30-50k a year aren't paying the pensions of anyone in IL. If

The Democrats would do this in a heartbeat to us in California if it weren't for Prop 13.

When your friends left the state, they left the Illinois bills for you to pay. Just wait till you get the property tax bill.

Sure they are if they pay property tax.

California has some of the highest combined taxes in the country, but also the highest poverty rate, worst performing schools, and the worst infrastructure.
http://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jul/11/travis-allen/mostly-true-californias-taxes-among-highest-nation/

How does that happen?

Could it be...........wait for it............we have total Democrat political control that pisses too much of our tax dollars away on gold plated government salaries and pensions instead of providing us good schools, services and infrastructure?

socal2 says

California has some of the highest combined taxes in the country, but also the highest poverty rate, worst performing schools, and the worst infrastructure.
http://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jul/11/travis-allen/mostly-true-californias-taxes-among-highest-nation/

How does that happen?

Could it be...........wait for it............we have total Democrat political control that pisses too much of our tax dollars away on gold plated government salaries and pensions instead of providing us good schools, services and infrastructure?

Welcome to the Socialist Republic of California. No more need to be said.

Now you have an unfunded liability in the range of $7–8 trillion.

Blurtman says

Now you have an unfunded liability in the range of $7–8 trillion.

You don't get it. Just add that to the national debt. $20 trillions or 27... who cares.... It's just a meaningless statistic.

Democrats are willing to let cities burn to the ground with bankruptcy, crime, shitty schools and failing infrastructure to keep their corruption feedback loop going with the unions and public sector bureaucracy.

It is wrong to assume that only D's do that. R's are no different. Ft Worth in TX is R but they have the same problems: http://dfw.cbslocal.com/video/3707215-fort-worth-facing-pension-crisis/
Pensions are used to buy votes from public unions and both parties do that.

- give me, give me, give me, tax the rich, tax the rich, tax the rich, give me, give me, give me... strangle the "greedy" private sector, give government golden pensions. Very much like North Korea, where government is the monopoly and those closer to the center have all the money and power, while private sector is dead turned into a local ant colony of slaves that serve the government.

yep, that liberal stupidity knows no end.

All the right-to-work states are run by Republicans.

http://www.publicsectorinc.org/2014/10/why-pension-plans-are-left-unfunded/

The biggest joke of the costing and funding process is the so-called annual required contribution (ARC) that the actuarial valuation is supposed to determine. In reality, there is nothing “required” about the ARC – most jurisdictions can contribute absolutely nothing and face no legal repercussions, at least in the short run. And when state and local governments don’t make the ARC, they rarely look at, let alone disclose, the long-term cost of postponing the payment and how much more expensive the benefits become as a result. Just look at Illinois, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which owe some $300 billion in unfunded liabilities between them, or at the sad condition of once glorious cities like Philadelphia, Chicago and Detroit, teetering towards or already in bankruptcy.

Until after the last financial crisis, some public pension plans assumed annual returns as high as 9 percent, thus significantly reducing the money governments had to contribute. Investment fees and other expenses are commonly swept under the rug when projecting and reporting on performance benchmarks. Pay raises and COLAs are routinely underestimated.

Funding schedules mapped out with these flawed assumptions are further rigged to fail. They often promise graduated payments and push the full-funding deadline decades out, thus eroding overall investment returns and inflating costs.

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When all other avenues for postponement are exhausted, states pull a particularly entertaining smoke-and-mirrors trick: they work around the actuaries and legislate their own required contribution.

In Massachusetts, the dollar values of state contributions for years ahead are written directly into the pension law without reference to the ARC. Not surprisingly, those values are well below the actuarial determination or what the law mandates for municipalities and other pension systems in the commonwealth. Illinois has repeatedly declared “pension holidays” for itself and helped bury Chicago deeper into its current fiscal hole by keeping pension-payment requirements for the city way below what they should have been.

I think it's probably true that some republican politicians are more likely to laugh as they postpone funding to pension funds, knowing full well that they can blame the greedy workers for expecting compensation promises to be kept.

Interesting that only when California had had simultaneous governor and legislature controlled by democrats that they started to seriously address pensions fund problems.

That applies to the Russians and the Chinese, but not to the North Koreans as they do not have the capacity to destroy us just now. The idea is to never let them have that capability.
What's your solution?

The government is not your daddy. The government is not your mommy.

http://nypost.com/2014/01/05/us-is-the-greatest-threat-to-world-peace-poll/

If Muslims are maniacs who kill people for no reason, why aren't they bombing Chile?