Public Employees Pensions Will Sink California

Good summary on the forthcoming (or current) State of California pension crisis by Pepperdine University professor Gary Galles.

"In California, the political solution has been to reward the influential generously, but dodge public scrutiny by deferring the big bills until retirement. When the deferred obligations become due, politicians hope to have moved on or, at worst, to be able to hide behind the fait accompli with "there's nothing we can do now."

"The first line of defense is the claim that public employees are underpaid compared with private-sector counterparts, so retirement benefits must be sweetened to compensate. That may have been true once - although one would look in vain for a private-sector counterpart with similar job and wage security - but those days are in the past for most government workers, many of whose salaries also now exceed salaries in the private sector."

Read the whole article here.