Actually, public employees and not everywhere - NY gets no mention - but what if you're in New Jersey, or Illinois, or California? The answer is in the last paragraph.
An editorial from last week.
According to the study, accrued liabilities—how much states are on the hook for—between 2003 and 2016 grew more than 50% faster than the economies in 28 states and more than twice as fast as GDP in 12 states. Leading the list are the usual suspects of New Jersey (4.3 times faster than GDP), Illinois (3.23) and Connecticut (3.18), as well as New Hampshire (3.46) and Kentucky (3.08).
Between 2003 and 2016, New Jersey’s pension liability ballooned 176%. Unions blame lawmakers for not socking away more money years ago, though lower pension payments helped them bargain for higher pay. The reality is that New Jersey’s pension funds would be broke even had politicians squirrelled away billions more.
Ditto for Illinois, where the pension liability has grown by 8.8% annually over the last 30 years. Yet when the Illinois Supreme Court in 2015 blocked state pension reforms, the judges rebuked politicians for inadequately funding pensions. The solution, according to unions, is always to raise taxes. But no tax hike is ever enough because benefits keep growing faster than revenues.
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Stanford University lecturer David Crane has calculated that every additional penny that California schools have received from the state’s 2012 “millionaire’s tax,” which raised the top individual rate to 13.3% from 10.3%, has gone toward retirement benefits. The only salve to state pension woes, as the Wirepoints study notes, is to rein in current worker benefits.
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