News From Other States -- August 30, 2015

From today's Los Angeles Times: taxpayers have never paid more for public worker pensions but it is still not enough. The good news: the state is working on a plan to help insure the state's pension program remains solvent. Guess how they plan to do that:

• they are going to move more of their equity holdings into bonds
• bonds do not provide as much return, but they tend not to be as volatile

If the return is not as good as the return they are now getting, how does the state plan to make up the difference?

The plan would increase payments from taxpayers even more in coming years with the goal of mitigating the severe financial pain that would happen with another recession and stock market crash.

Under the proposal, CalPERS would begin slowly moving more money into safer investments such as bonds, which aren't usually subject to the severe losses that stocks face.

Because the more conservative investments are expected to reduce CalPERS' future financial returns, taxpayers would have to pick up even more of the cost of workers' pensions.

Will the folks who are actually going to get the pensions have to pay more? Of course not. I cannot make this stuff up.

Most public workers would be exempt from paying any more. Only those workers hired in 2013 or later would have to contribute more to their retirements under the plan.

Actually, that's a bit disingenuous. All new hires would pay more and then we would have people working side-by-side paying different amounts for their pension. That hardly seems fair. LOL.

And, of course, the state is rationalizing all this by saying, "well, that's how others are doing it":

The changes would begin moving CalPERS — which provides benefits to 1.7 million employees and retirees of the state, cities and other local governments — toward a strategy used by many corporate pension plans. For years, corporate plans have been reducing their risk by trimming the amount of stocks they hold.

One reason for the current cash shortage:

The large hike in pension benefits that state legislators voted to give public workers in 1999 when the stock market was booming.

Anyway, so that's California.

Meanwhile the governor of Minnesota calls folks in North Dakota "Neanderthals" because they still use coal for electricity. 

A reader noted that "name-calling" usually begins when the individual has lost the intellectual argument.

Meanwhile, North Dakotans just go on about their business, providing food and energy for the rest of the nation and asking for nothing in return.

By the way, bad, bad news for Alaska. Here's the photo op that President Obama is trying to achieve when he visits Alaska. Being reported in the Los Angeles Times but it looks like he won't be able to get to this island. It looks like President Obama will work to achieve his environmental goals for the Lower 48 on the backs of Alaskans by barring access to natural resources.