NCPERS News Clips

4/13/2010

News Clips for April 13th, 2010

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• Shortfall Awaits California's Big Pension Funds
  A study released Monday by Stanford University estimates that California's three largest state-operated, public-employee pension funds—the California Public Employees' Retirement System, California State Teachers' Retirement System and University of California Retirement System—currently face a total shortfall of more than $500 billion.
• California Gets a Bad Rap on Pensions in NYT
  California has done some really really stupid things (like a tax credit for first time homebuyers), but the NYT did the state and its readers a disservice in going after California's pension fund liabilities. The basic story is that if you assume a 4.14 nominal rate of return on pension fund assets, then the state's pension liabilities look really really bad.
• Teachers' Pension Gap May Be Triple That Reported
  Taxpayers across the U.S. owe public school teacher retirement accounts about $933 billion, nearly triple the amount reported by the plans themselves, a study says.
• Newton alderman fights Las Vegas junket
  A Newton alderman has presented a resolution asking the city's Retirement Board to reconsider its decision to use $5,000 in retirement funds to send two members to a conference next month in Las Vegas.
• Study: Pension trouble will last years
  The struggle to fund public pension plans is dogging most states in the country and probably will continue for years before it eases, a new study concludes.
• Fuzzy math and public pension hysteria
  David Crane is an unserious man with a serious purpose -- attacking public employees and public employee pensions, as he did in his April 6 Times Op-Ed article, "The $500-billion pension time bomb."
• Missouri Senate endorses bill shrinking pensions
  Missouri senators endorsed legislation Monday designed to save money through changes to public retirement systems, including increasing the minimum retirement age and requiring workers to contribute to their pensions.
• Public employees deserve decent pensions
  Any diminishment in retirement benefits will only mean that these public employees will require greater compensation in the salary portion of their compensation packages in order to fund their retirements