NYT,pg1: Public Pension Plans Face Billions in Shortages

[DeepModem Mom]

Public Pension Plans Face Billions in Shortages
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
Published: August 8, 2006

....Across the nation, a number of states, counties and municipalities have engaged in many of the same maneuvers with their pension funds that San Diego did, but without the crippling scandal — at least not yet.

It is hard to know the extent of the problems, because there is no central regulator to gather data on public plans. Nor is the accounting for government pension plans uniform, so comparing one with another can be unreliable.

But by one estimate, state and local governments owe their current and future retirees roughly $375 billion more than they have committed to their pension funds.

And that may well understate the gap: Barclays Global Investments has calculated that if America’s state pension plans were required to use the same methods as corporations, the total value of the benefits they have promised would grow 22 percent, to $2.5 trillion. Only $1.7 trillion has been set aside to pay those benefits....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/business/08pension.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=all

[SpiralHawk]

1. "I've got mine, so tough shit for all you proles." - George AWOL Bush and

the republicon "elite"

Koservative republicon komassion in action

[sinkingfeeling]

2. I have a solution. We will start with the 7th. District Court judges.

Their 'pensions' will be immediately converted to cash balances, based on the same flawed and age discriminate formulas used by IBM Corporation in 1999. These judges overturned the land-mark Cooper vs. IBM case yesterday. 140,000 older (now retired) IBM employees were told that our 'disappointed expectations were not material' to the case.