Public pensions

The Underrecognized, Undervalued, Underpaid, Unfunded Pension Liabilities

March 9, 2018 By Ed Ring 4 Comments

“It’s the economy, stupid.”
– Campaign slogan, Clinton campaign, 1992

To paraphrase America’s 42nd president, when it comes to public sector pensions – their financial health and the policies that govern them – it’s the unfunded liability, stupid.

The misunderstood, obfuscated, unaccountable, underrecognized, undervalued, underpaid, unfunded pension liabilities.

According to CalPERS own data, California’s cities that are part of the CalPERS system will make “normal” contributions this year totaling $1.3 billion. Their “unfunded” contributions will be 41% greater, $1.8 billion. As for counties that participate in CalPERS, this year their “normal” contributions will total $586 million, and their “unfunded” contributions will be 36% greater at $607 million.

That’s nothing, however. Again using CalPERS own estimates, in just six years the unfunded contribution for cities will more than double, from $1.8 billion today, to $3.9 billion in 2024. The unfunded contribution for counties will nearly triple, from $607 million today to $1.5 billion in 2024 (download spreadsheet summary for all CalPERS cities and counties).

Put another way, by 2024, “normal contribution” payments by cities and counties to CalPERS are estimated to total $2.8 billion, and the “unfunded contribution” payments are estimated to total almost exactly twice as much, $5.5 billion.

So what?

For starters, every pension reform that has ever made it through the state legislature, including the Public Employee Pension Reform Act of 2013(PEPRA), does NOT require public employees to share in the cost to pay the unfunded liability. The implications are profound. As public agency press releases crow over the phasing in of a “50% employee share” of the costs of pensions, not mentioned is the fact that this 50% only applies to 1/3 of what’s being paid. Public employees are only required to share, via payroll withholding, in the “normal cost” of the pension.

Now if the “normal cost” were ever estimated at anywhere near the actual cost to fund a pension, this wouldn’t matter. But CalPERS, according to their own most recent financial report, is only 68% funded. That is, they have investments totaling $326 billion, and liabilities totaling $477 billion. This gap, $151 billion, is how much more CalPERS needs to have invested in order for their pension system to be fully funded.

A pension system’s “liability” refers to the present value of every future pension payment that every current participant – active or retired – has earned so far. In a 100% funded system, if every active employee retired tomorrowand no more payments ever went into the system, if the invested assets were equal to that liability, those assets plus the estimated future earnings on those invested assets would be enough to pay 100% of the estimated pension payments in the future, until every individual beneficiary died.

A pension system’s “normal payment” refers to the amount of money that has to be paid into a fully funded system each year to fund the present value of additional pension benefits earned by active employees in that year. When the normal payment isn’t enough, the unfunded liability grows.

And wow, has it grown.

CalPERS is $151 billion in the hole. All of California’s state and local pension systems combined, CalPERS, CalSTRS, and the many city and county independent systems, are estimated to be $326 billion in the hole. And that’s extrapolated from estimates recognized by the pension funds themselves. Scenarios that employ more conservative earnings assumptions calculate total unfunded liabilities that are easily double that amount.

With respect to CalPERS, how did this unfunded liability get so big?

An earlier CPC analysis released earlier this year attempts to answer this. Theories include the following: (1) Letting the agencies decide which type of asset smoothing they’d like to employ, (2) permitting the agencies to make minimal payments on the unfunded liability so the liability would actually increase despite the payments, (3) making overly optimistic actuarial assumptions, (4) not taking action sooner so the unfunded payment wouldn’t end up being more than twice as much as the normal payment.

One final alarming point.

CalPERS recently announced that for any future increases to the unfunded liability, the unfunded payment will have to be calculated based on a 20 year, straight-line amortization. This is a positive development, since the more aggressively participants pay down the unfunded liability, the less likely it is that these pension systems will experience a financial collapse if there is a sustained downturn in investment performance. But it begs the question – why, if only increases to the unfunded liability have to be paid down more aggressively, is the unfunded payment nonetheless predicted to double within the next six years?

CalPERS information officer Tara Gallegos, when presented with this question, offered the following answers:

(1) The discount rate (equal to the projected rate-of-return on invested assets) is being lowered from 7.5% to 7.0% per year. But this lowering is being phased in over five years, so it will not impact the 2018 unfunded contribution. Whenever the return-on-investment assumption is lowered, the amount of the unfunded liability goes up. By 2024, the full impact of the lowered discount rate will have been applied, significantly increasing the required unfunded contribution.

(2) Investment returns were lower than the projected rate of return for the years ending 6/30/2015 (2.4%) and 6/30/2016 (0.6%). Lower than projected actual returns also increases the unfunded liability, and hence the amount of the unfunded payment, but this too is being phased-in over five years. Therefore it will not impact the unfunded payment in 2018, but will be fully impacting the unfunded payment by 2024.

(3) The unfunded payment automatically increases by 3% per year to reflect the payroll growth assumption of 3% per year. This alone accounts, over six years, for 20% of the increase to the unfunded payment. The reason for this is because most current unfunded payments are calculated by cities and counties using the so-called “percent of payroll” method, where payments are structured to increase each year. CalPERS is going to require new unfunded payments to not only be on a 20 year payback schedule, but to use a “level payment” structure which prevents negative amortization in the early years of the term. Unfortunately, up to now, cities and counties were permitted to backload their payments on the unfunded liability, and hence each year have built in increases to their unfunded payments.

The real reason the unfunded liability has gotten so big is because nobody wanted to make conservative estimates. Everybody wanted the normal payments to be as small as possible. The public sector unions wanted to minimize how much their members would have to contribute via withholding. CalPERS and the politicians – both heavily influenced by the public sector unions – wanted to sell generous new pension enhancements to voters, and to do that they needed to make the costs appear minimal.

As a result, taxpayers are now paying 100% of an “unfunded contribution” that is already a bigger payment than the normal contribution, and within a few years is destined, best case, to be twice as much as the normal contribution.

Camouflaged by its conceptual intricacy, the cleverly obfuscated, deliberately underrecognized, creatively undervalued, chronically underpaid, belatedly rising unfunded pension liabilities payments are poised to gobble up every extra dime of California’s tax revenue. And that’s not all…

Sitting on the blistering thin skin of a debt bubble, a housing bubble, and a stock market bubble, amid rising global economic uncertainty, just one bursting jiggle will cause pension fund assets to plummet as unfunded liabilities soar.

And when that happens, cities and counties have to pay these new unfunded balances down on honest, 20 year straight-line terms. They’ll be selling the parks and libraries, starving the seniors, releasing the criminals, firing cops and firefighters, and enacting emergency, confiscatory new taxes.

Whatever it takes to feed additional billions into the maw of the pension systems.

Budget surplus? Dream on.

* * *

Edward Ring co-founded the California Policy Center in 2010 and served as its president through 2016. He is a prolific writer on the topics of political reform and sustainable economic development.

RELATED ARTICLES

How to Restore Financial Sustainability to Public Pensions, February 14, 2018

How to Assess Impact of a Market Correction on Pension Payments, February 7, 2018

California Government Pension Contributions Required to Double by 2024 – Best Case, January 31, 2018

Did CalPERS Use Accounting “Gimmicks” to Enable Financially Unsustainable Pensions?, January 24, 2018

How Much More Will Cities and Counties Pay CalPERS?, January 10, 2018

If You Think the Bull Market Rescued Pensions, Think Again, December 7, 2017

Did CalPERS Fail to Disclose Costs of Historic Bump in Pension Benefits?, October 26, 2017

Coping With the Pension Albatross, October 13, 2017

How Fraudulently Low “Normal Contributions” Wreak Havoc on Civic Finances, September 29, 2017

Pension Reform – The San Jose Model, September 6, 2017

Pension Reform – The San Diego Model, August 23, 2017

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: CalPERS, Ed Ring, pensions, Public pensions

City services slashed to fund pensions, but your taxes are still going up

December 28, 2017 By Steven Greenhut 11 Comments

In the coming months and years, California voters can expect to see a variety of tax increases pop up on their local election ballots. They will be called “public safety” taxes to hire more police or firefighters or “parks” or “library” taxes to pay for those popular public services. But don’t be fooled. Any new tax proposal is in reality a “pension tax” designed to help the California Public Employees’ Retirement System make up for shortfalls in its investment strategy.

In fact, liberal interest groups are getting ready to circulate a statewide ballot initiative that will gut Proposition 13 – the 1978 initiative that has limited property tax increases to 1 percent of a property’s sales price. It also limits property tax increases to 2 percent a year. The new initiative would remove those protections from many commercial property owners, thus raising taxes by another $11 billion a year. Money is fungible, so this is partly about paying for pensions, too.

California has an enormous problem with pension costs. Many observers see it as a crisis that threatens the economic health of the state. A recent study from the well-respected Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, run by former Democratic Assemblyman Joe Nation, details how pension costs already are “crowding out” public services, especially at the local level. Cities pay so much for retired employees that they are cutting spending on everything else.

“California public pension plans are funded on the basis of policies and assumptions that can delay recognition of their true cost,” according to the report. Yet pension costs still are rising and “are certain to continue their rise over the next one to two decades, even under assumptions that critics regard as optimistic.” So they are cutting “core services, including higher education, social services, public assistance, welfare, recreation and libraries, health, public works, and in some cases, public safety.”

Aside from cutting public services and running up and hiding debt levels, there’s only one other way that localities can come up with the cash to pay for these overly generous pensions, especially as pension costs consume 15 percent or more of their general-fund revenue. They will raise taxes. Meanwhile, the state government has to backfill pension costs as well, which leads to constant pressure for legislators to promote additional state-level tax increases. It’s a “heads they win, tails you lose” situation, as Californians pay more to get less.

Much of the problem goes back to 1999, when the Legislature rammed through a law to provide 50-percent pension increases to the California Highway Patrol. Backers knew that once CHP received these overly generous deals (including retroactivity, which is a pure giveaway that hikes pensions back to each employee’s starting date), pension increases would spread across the state. Indeed, they did. CalPERS said it wouldn’t cost taxpayers a “dime” because of stock-market growth, but then the market crashed.

Under the current defined-benefit system, public employees are promised an irrevocable level of pension benefits based on a formula. For instance, most California “public safety” workers (police, fire, billboard inspectors, prison guards, etc.) receive “3 percent at 50.” If they work 30 years, they get 90 percent of their final three years’ pay (often higher, because of pension-spiking gimmicks) until they die. They can retire with full benefits at age 50. Non-safety workers often receive a pension formula that lets them retire with 81 percent of their final pay beginning at age 57. These are very generous benefits given their typically high final salaries.

CalPERS invests the money in the stock market. It calculates the “unfunded pension liabilities” (i.e., debt) based on a projected rate of return for their investments. Higher expectations enable the pension funds and cities to go along their merry way, not worrying about their ability to pay for all the promises and avoiding pressure to pare back pay levels. CalPERS just lowered its rate of return from 7.5 percent to 7 percent, which is still overly optimistic.

But the lowered assumed rates mean that cities have to pay the pension fund additional fees to cover the difference. This is cutting into their operating budgets. In fact, cities have faced four rate increases in the past five years and are expecting a fifth one. A recent article tells the stories of El Segundo and Arcadia, two Los Angeles County cities that are considering hiking their sales taxes to maintain their current level of service.

El Segundo’s mayor pro tem said that in five years “the payment to CalPERS is expected to be $18 million and 25 percent of general fund revenue as the employer rate for safety employees increases from 50 percent of pay to 80 percent of pay,” reported Calpensions’ Ed Mendel. He noted that cities face a statewide cap on the size of their sales tax, but that Gov. Jerry Brown in October signed a law that allows some localities to bust through that cap.

You can see what’s coming: A push by unions to eliminate the sales-tax cap across the state, and a torrent of sales tax increases to pay for soaring pension costs. The other thing to expect: Continuing efforts to hide the size of the pension debt.

“The nation’s largest pension system is expected to adopt a funding plan … that anticipates shortfalls during the next decade and then banks on exceptional investment returns over the following half century to make up the difference,” wrote Contra Costa Times columnist Dan Borenstein this week. “It’s an absurd strategy designed to placate labor unions, who want more public money available now for raises, and local government officials who are struggling to make annual installment payments on past debt CalPERS has rung up.”

The only other hope beyond debt and taxes is if the California Supreme Court guts the so-called California Rule, which forbids governments from reducing pension benefits even going forward unless they are provided with something of equal or greater value. That “rule” has made it nearly impossible to reduce costs for current employees. But there’s no guarantee the court will roll back the rule in a case it will soon consider – or that the state and localities will bother to cut back benefit levels even if they are allowed to do so given union political power.

In the meantime, expect not only more of the same of hidden debt and reduced government services – but tax increases at every turn.

Steven Greenhut is a contributing editor for the California Policy Center. He is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

This article was originally published by the California Policy Center

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: CalPERS, pensions, Prop 13, Public pensions, Steven Greenhut

Dems want to raise property taxes to fund government pensions

October 15, 2017 By Joel Fox 19 Comments

I guess I should use the old vaudeville line: Stop me if you’ve heard this one: the push to increase commercial property taxes is about government pension costs. Returning to this subject at this time (I wrote on the same subject for the Sacramento Bee last April) is prompted by the coming together of a couple of recent events.

There was the League of Women Voters and other groups hosting a meeting in Los Angeles this past weekend to “educate” people and advocate for a split roll property tax seeking to raise billions of tax dollars on the back of businesses. Also last week, Stanford University’s Institute for Policy Research issued a report by professor and former Democratic legislator Joe Nation describing the pension burden that is beginning to strangle state and local governments in California.

The services that are affected by both the split roll rally and the Stanford report are quite similar.

Supporters of the split roll say that raising taxes on commercial property will provide $9 billion a year needed for schools and services provided by local governments. Meanwhile, Joe Nation’s report says that because of pension contributions by employers (i.e. governments) increasing an average of 400% over the past 15 years, educational services, recreation, community services and others are squeezed for lack of money.

Many “core mission services,” as defined by the Stanford report, will be starved of money because of pension demands. The split roll advocates talk about the need for more money for local services. What they don’t tell you is that money for those services is being diverted to cover the pension requirements of state and local governments because these governments made generous promises to workers and accepted revenue projections to cover those promises that did not play out.

Instead of admitting that more money is needed to cover pension costs, split roll advocates create a false argument about business dodging its fair share of property taxes. They claim homeowners now pay a much larger share of the property tax burden than they did prior to Proposition 13. A Legislative Analyst’s Office report undercuts that false claim.

The report states in part, “Homeowners pay a slightly larger share of property taxes today than they did when Proposition 13 passed. Proposition 13 does not appear to have caused this increase. … In part, this may be due to faster growth in the number of residential properties than the number of commercial and industrial properties.”

The so-called grassroots activity seeking support for a split roll is backed by powerful public employee unions who support more revenues to cover the pension costs. Yet, you won’t hear anything from the split roll advocates about the pensions strangling local budgets or pushing some cities toward bankruptcies.

Meanwhile, the Stanford study makes it clear with numerous examples that pensions are absorbing greater and greater portions of local government budgets. The Stanford study states clearly there is “agreement on one fact: public pension costs are making it harder to provide services that have traditionally been considered part of government’s core mission.”

This piece was originally published by Fox and Hounds Daily

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Joel Fox, Pension Reform, pensions, Prop 13, Property Taxes, Public pensions, Spilt roll, taxes

Questions for Someone Who Supports Superior Benefits for Government Workers

February 2, 2017 By Ed Ring 4 Comments

“Without disputing the figures, Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., said the findings are misleading because they do not compare specific classes of employees or account for differences in education levels and total hours worked.”
California Is Golden State For Public Employees, by Michael Carroll, AMI Newswire, Jan. 31, 2017

Ms. Morrissey has a point, even though there was no intent to “mislead.” While our recent study “California’s Public Sector Compensation Trends,” found that full-time public sector workers in California earn pay and benefits that average at least twice as high as their counterparts in the private sector, going into comparisons by specific class of employee was beyond the scope of that particular study. But Ms. Morrissey is missing the forest for the trees.

First of all, as acknowledged in Carroll’s article where Morrissey is quoted, the study found that California’s public employees earn pay and benefits that average 39 percent higher than their public sector counterparts in the rest of the U.S. So especially in California, we conclude there are two classes of workers – public sector workers, whose 2015 pay and benefits averaged $139,691 for full-time work (if you properly fund their pensions), and private sector workers, who, very best case, earned pay and benefits that averaged $62,475.

Everybody knows that public sector workers have, on average, higher levels of education than private sector workers. Should this translate into average (and median, by the way) total earnings that are twice what all private sector workers receive? It challenges credulity.

Ms. Morrissey’s biography states, “She is active in coalition efforts to reform our private retirement system to ensure an adequate, secure,and affordable retirement for all workers.” Bravo. That is a goal we share. And so in the spirit of aligning ourselves with practical, feasible, equitable objectives towards achieving that goal, Ms. Morrissey is invited to answer the following questions:

(1) Do you think what public sector pensions (ref. CalPERS, the largest) pay to California’s government retirees should be three to five times what Social Security offers private sector retirees?

(2) The average current retiree pension – not including retirement health benefits – for a state/local government worker with 30 years of service is $67,762 per year (click on any pension system to see average per former employer). There are 10 million Californians over the age of 55, 25 percent of the total population. If all of them received a pension of $67,762 per year, that would cost $677 billion dollars, 32 percent of California’s aggregate personal income of $2.1 trillion. Do you think people who are retired should collect state-funded pensions worth more on average than the earnings of people who work? Do you think this is feasible?

(3) Defenders of unaltered state/local government pension benefits in California argue that pension benefits are primarily paid for via investment returns. But they claim investment returns can average 7.5 percent per year (4.5 percent after adjusting for inflation), “risk free.” Are YOU, Ms. Morrissey, willing to personally guarantee that MY retirement investments will earn this much? Because if you are, I’ll invest every penny I’ve got with you.

(4) Our “apples-to-apples” comparison of California’s new “Secure Choice” pension option for private citizens yielded the following comparisons: (a) Public sector: Teachers/Bureaucrats, 30 years work – pension is 75 percent of final salary. (b) Public sector: Public Safety, 30 years work – pension is 90 percent of final salary. (c) Private sector: “Secure Choice,” 30 years work – pension is 27.6 percent of final salary. Do you think this disparity is fair to private sector workers?

(5) Can you explain why public sector pensions are not subject to the same conservative funding and investing rules as private sector pensions are under ERISA?

(6) Do you support government programs that offer ALL American workers the SAME retirement benefits, subject to the SAME formulas and incentives, or not?

In reference to our recent CPC study, Ms. Morrissey is also on record as saying, “There have been a lot of attacks on public-sector unions because their members have been a stalwart voting block for the Democratic Party, but that doesn’t mean they’re overpaid.” This remark suggests Ms. Morrissey thinks nonpartisan “attacks” on government unions aren’t justifiable and won’t happen. That is incorrect.

Government unions, unlike private sector unions, have the ability to negotiate for financially unsustainable pay and benefits because they control their bosses through campaign contributions, because their bosses are politicians instead of business people, and because these pay and benefit packages are paid for through coercive taxes instead of via allocations of precarious profits.

Government unions have created two tiers of workers in this country. Government workers not only have unaffordable pay and retirement security, but their union leaders have an incentive to support government policies that destabilize and divide this nation, because that will create the need for even more unionized government workers. Government unions, intrinsically, are economically damaging and politically authoritarian.

“Unsustainable” means that sooner or later an end will come. When the money is gone, Morrissey and her gang will have a lot more questions to answer.

Ed Ring is the director of policy research for the California Policy Center.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: California Policy Center, CalPERS, Ed Ring, Monique Morrissey, Public pensions, social security

Association of Pension Funds Blacklists Reform Organizations

December 26, 2016 By Ed Ring 1 Comment

In an press release from the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems dated December 19, 2016, the California Policy Center, and its spinoff online publication, UnionWatch, were both chosen, for the 2nd year in a row, as one of only 28 “policy and research organizations” that NCPERS has deemed to be “Think Tanks that Undercut Pensions.” Ponder the significance of this excerpt from that same press release: “Under the Code of Conduct, NCPERS urges its corporate members to disclose whether they contribute to these organizations.”

What exactly were the transgressions of the California Policy Center, and UnionWatch, that earned them a place on this list of undesirables? That earned them an admonition from NCPERS to its corporate members to boycott us, or else? Here is their list of criteria – and, briefly, our response:

How to be a think tank that gets blacklisted by NCPERS:

(1) Advocate or advance the claim that public defined-benefit plans are unsustainable.

Guilty. Public pension funds cannot possibly withstand the next market downturn. Unaltered, they will either bankrupt public institutions or cause taxes to be raised to punitive levels.

(2) Advocate for a defined-contribution plan to replace a public defined-benefit plan.

Not guilty. Our organization does recognize, however, that defined-contribution plans may be the only recourse, if significant changes are not made to restore financial sustainability to defined-benefit plans.

(3) Advocate for a poorly designed cash-balance plan to replace a defined-benefit plan.

Not guilty. We have not invested our resources in serious review of this policy option.

(4) Advocate for a poorly designed combination plan to replace the public defined-benefit plan.

Guilty, except that, of course, we believe a well designed combination plan could work. An example of this, fruitlessly advocated by California Governor Brown, is the “three legged stool” solution: A modest, sustainable pension, participation in Social Security, and a 401K savings plan with a modest employer contribution.

(5) Link school performance evaluations to whether a defined-benefit plan is available to teachers and school employees.

Not guilty. While it is probably true that providing teachers with the golden handcuffs of back-loaded pension benefit formulas guarantee the poor performers will stay on the job while those with talent will be more likely to pursue other employment options, we have not done any investigative work in this area. We applaud those who have.

More to the point, we applaud any corporate interest with the courage to stand up to American’s government union controlled pension systems by supporting pension reform organizations. They have a lot to lose.

Anyone who needs evidence to back up our assertion that government pension systems are joined with powerful financial special interests should consider the relationships between NCPERS – the “National Conference On Public Employee Retirement Systems” – and their “corporate membership.” NCPERS describes itself as “the principal trade association working to promote and protect pensions by focusing on Advocacy, Research and Education for the benefit of public sector pension stakeholders.”

NCPERS helpfully discloses those 36 corporations who have purchased the “enhanced level of corporate membership,” and it includes some of the most powerful financial firms on earth. To name a few: Acadian Asset Management, BNY Mellon, Evanston Capital Management, J.P. Morgan, Milliman, NASDAQ, Nikko Asset Management Americas, Northern Trust, Prudential Insurance Company, State Street Corporation and Ziegler Capital Management.

One would think corporate members with this much clout would mean the tail wags the dog, but NCPERS is a very big dog. As the political voice for nearly all major state and local public employee pension systems across the entire U.S., their lobbying muscle is backed up by nearly $4 trillion in invested assets. At one of their recent conferences, Chevron was a “platinum sponsor.”

Will Chevron ever oppose the lobbying agenda of NCPERS? Probably not. According to Yahoo Finance, BNY Mellon owns 1.34 percent of Chevron’s stock, Northern Trust owns 1.35 percent, and State Street Corporation owns 4.7 percent. That’s just the holdings of the NCPERS “enhanced members.” Moreover, pension systems don’t just invest through intermediaries such as BNY Mellon, they invest directly in these corporations. There is no financial special interest purchasing publicly traded U.S. stocks that is bigger than the pension fund members of NCPERS, and there is no client to the financial firms on Wall Street bigger than the pension fund members of NCPERS. Nothing comes even close.

No report on NCPERS would be complete without documenting just how thoroughly it is dominated by public sector and union operatives. Their president “served 3 terms on the Chicago Fire Fighters Union Local 2 executive board, resulting in two decades of union leadership.” Their first vice president, a retired police officer, “served as the first woman president of her union, FOP Queen City Lodge No. 69, from 2005 through 2015.” Their second vice president “is currently the statewide president of AFSCME Council 67, representing well over 30,000 members in 21 separate political jurisdictions.” Their secretary “has more than 30 years of service as a Tulsa public employee.” Their treasurer “served as a firefighter for 41 years. During his career, he held offices on the board of the IAFF Local 58.” Their immediate past president “is the treasurer of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), Local 2, American Federation of Teachers (AFT).”

That’s everyone. The entire management team of NCPERS. A government union controlled financial juggernaut, marching in lockstep with the most powerful players on Wall Street. The consequences are grim for the rest of us.

Public employee pension funds are aggressively attempting to invest nearly $4 trillion in assets to get a return of 7.0 percent per year. Collectively, they are underfunded – according to their own estimates which use this high rate of return – by at least $1 trillion. And by nearly all conventional economic indicators, today we are confronting a bubble in bonds, a bubble in housing, and a bubble in stocks. The alliance of financial special interests who don’t want this party to end, and government union leaders who don’t want to lose retirement benefits that are literally triple (or more) what private sector taxpayers can expect, is complicit in policies that have allowed these asset bubbles to inflate. When the bubbles pop, they will share the blame.

In the meantime, they blacklist those of us who call attention to their folly.

Ed Ring is the vice president for policy research at the California Policy Center.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: California Policy Center, Ed Ring, NCPERS, Pension Reform, Public pensions, UnionWatch

L.A.’s Unfunded Pension Liability Explodes to $15 Billion. Leadership Nowhere To Be Found

November 30, 2016 By Jack Humphreville 8 Comments

Photo courtesy of channone, flickr

LA WATCHDOG — Our enlightened elite who occupy Los Angeles City Hall tell us that pension reform is not necessary. After all, the recent actuarial report for the Fire and Police Pension Plan indicated that its $19 billion retirement plan was 94% funded as of June 30, 2016.

But as we all know, figures never lie, but liars figure, especially when it involves the finances of the city of Los Angeles.

The city will say that a pension plan that has assets equal to 80% of its future pension obligations is in good shape. Baloney! Pension plans should aim to be 100% funded, especially in down markets. And in today’s bull market, where the Dow Jones Industrial Average is hitting record highs, the pension plan should be 120% funded so that it can withstand another bear market.

Even at the 94% funded ratio, the unfunded pension liability for the retirement plan is pushing $1.2 billion, not exactly chump change when compared to the projected payroll of $1.4 billion for the 12,800 active cops and firefighters.

But there is more bad news that is buried in the opaque actuarial reports that, when pieced together and analyzed, reveals that the overall Fire and Police Pension Plan is over $6 billion in the red and that only 75% of its future obligations are funded.

The Fire and Police Pension Plans are also responsible for Other Post-employment Benefits (“OPEB”) which covers medical benefits for retirees. But the $3 billion of OPEB obligations are less than 50% funded, resulting in an additional $1.6 billion in unfunded liabilities.

The city is also cooking the books by “smoothing” the actual gains and losses in its investment portfolio over a seven year period. This little trick is covering up a $600 million hit to its investment portfolio.

Finally, if the newly calculated liability (that includes adjustments for OPEB and smoothing) of $3.4 billion (85% funded) is adjusted to reflect the more realistic investment rate assumption of 6.5% (as recommended by Warren Buffett), the unfunded pension liability soars to $6.25 billion and the funded ratio plummets to 75%.

When combined with the $9 billion liability of the Los Angeles Employees’ Retirement System, the city’s total unfunded pension liability exceeds $15 billion. And this liability is expected to double over the next ten years based on realistic rates of return that are in the range of 6% to 6.5%.

But what are Mayor Eric Garcetti, City Council President Herb Wesson, Budget and Finance Chair Paul Krekorian, and Personnel Chair Paul Koretz doing to address the single most important financial issue facing the city?

Nothing! Absolutely nothing other than put their heads in a potato sack and hope that a robust stock market will make the $15 billion problem go away.

They have ignored the recommendations of the LA 2020 Commission to form a Committee on Retirement Security to review and analyze the city’s two pension plans and develop proposals to “achieve equilibrium on retirement costs by 2020.”

Krekorian and Koretz made the bone headed suggestion to raise the investment rate assumption to 8% so that the city would be able to lower its annual required pension contributions to the underfunded pension plans, allowing more money for union raises.

Wesson has not even created a Council File for the pension and budget recommendations of the LA 2020 Commission.

But the real culprit is Garcetti who has refused to address the pension mess that will eventually become a crisis. He has not asked his political appointees on the two pension boards to initiate a study of the pension plans and the city’s ever increasing contributions that now devour 20% of the city’s General Fund budget. He has refused to contest the State’s Supreme Court “California Rule” which does not allow the city to reform the pension plans by lowering future, yet to be earned benefits.

Rather than look out for the best interests of the city and all Angelenos, he continues to kiss the rings of the campaign funding union leaders who are vital to his political ambitions.

The city’s lack of openness and transparency and its unwillingness to address its ever growing, unsustainable $15 billion pension liability can only be categorized as a major league cover up that should be front and center in the upcoming March election.

Where’s Eric?

Jack Humphreville writes LA Watchdog for CityWatch. He is the President of the DWP Advocacy Committee and is the Budget and DWP representative for the Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council. He is a Neighborhood Council Budget Advocate. Jack is affiliated with Recycler Classifieds — www.recycler.com. He can be reached at: lajack@gmail.com.

This piece was originally published by CityWatchLA

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Eric Garcetti, Fire and Police Pension Plan, Los Angeles, Pension Reform, Public pensions, Unfunded pension liabilities

Mapping the $100,000+ CA Public Employee Pensions at CalPERS Costing Taxpayers $3.0B

November 28, 2016 By Adam Andrzejewski Leave a Comment

Editor’s note: This piece was originally posted by Forbes.com

The California Public Employee Retirement System (CalPERS) is the USA’s largest pension fund with $301 billion in assets. It’s also a lucrative transfer mechanism helping 1,251 local governments confer ‘highly compensated’ pensions to tens of thousands of public employees. Updated numbers displayed at OpenTheBooks.com show there is a $2.8 billion annual cost to payout 21,862 six-figure public-sector retirees via CalPERS.

In California, according to data captured by OpenTheBooks.com, the Top 10 All-Time CalPERS public employee pensions start at $390,485 per year.

It’s a massive payout equivalent to the combined income tax payments of nearly 1.6 million individual California taxpayers.

So which CA governments conferred the most $100,000 plus pensions through CalPERS?

Using our interactive mapping tool, quickly review (by last employer ZIP code) the 21,862 public employee retirees at CalPERS who pulled-down a pension of $100,000 or more. Just click on a pin and use the scroll bar to review the results rendered in the chart beneath the map.

The ‘Big Dog’ units of government conferring the most $100,000 retirement pensions include the California Highway Patrol (1,066); Santa Clara County (836); City of Oakland (509); CA Forestry and Fire Protection (476); Riverside County (461); City of Long Beach (351); CA Dept. of Justice (280); CA Corrections, Paroles and Com (275); CA Corrections (268); and the City of Anaheim (253).

No one has hit the pension jackpot quite like the sworn officers of the California Highway Patrol (CHP). Of the 1,066 six-figure retirees, their average pension is $10,192 per month or $122,304 annually. On top of that, there are the 6,350 active employees at CHP averaging $115,000 in pay with taxpayers chipping in another $48,300 in pension contributions. Therefore, each officer costs $163,000 in pay and pension costs alone.

Meanwhile, Riverside County has 461 six-figure retirees and the top 12 retirements each exceed $200,000 per year. Last year, the assistant sheriff made $653,025 by cashing in banks of unused benefits, i.e. leave.

Pension envy in California is real. The hard working private sector doesn’t have benefits even remotely close to government workers.

It’s no surprise that Oakland is a sanctuary city for highly compensated public employees. It’s ranked third most in $100,000 pensions with its top 509 retirements averaging $126,000 per year. But, soon, the pension problems worsen: Oakland pays 1,251 active employees more than $100,000.

We discovered a ‘$1 Million General Manager’ position at the Los Angeles Sanitary District (LASD). In 2007, LASD General Manager James Stahl retired on a pension of $303,420. His replacement, Stephen Maguin, retired on a pension of $345,408 in 2012. Today, the new ‘General Manager’ earns a salary of $336,972. So it takes $1 million to fund a general manager position where there’s two retirees and only one is working!

In many cases the system legalized corruption. Public pensions are not only for government employees, but are also for special non-government and private associations clouted into the public pension plan at CalPERS. Incredibly, taxpayers guarantee and help fund the pensions but have no say over the salary spiking that pads lifetime pensions (i.e. huge end-of-career raises that increase lifetime pension payouts).

For example, the California School Boards Association is a self-described non-profit organization yet a private entity muscled into the public pension plan. In 2010, Executive Director Scott Plotkin was investigated and exposed for paying out a $175,000 ‘bonus’ which spiked his pay to $540,000 (2008). In an attempt to save face he retired, but now taxpayers guarantee his lifetime pension largess of $148,620.

This is the new ‘CalPERS Effect,’ in which the system itself became an outright lobbyist for higher member benefits. Now, even small towns and agencies are gaming the system for personal gain.

West Hollywood – home of the Sunset Strip – contracts its library, police, and fire protection from the county. Although it occupies less than two square miles, it still employs 69 staffers with salaries over $100,000. In 2010, the city allowed its assistant manager, Joan English, to retire on a $177,048 pension. Immediately, she was rehired on a ‘temporary’ basis in the same position.

Another example: the California Bar Association (CBA) pays six-figures to 133 currently active employees, plus there are 13 CBA retirees on $100,000 plus pensions. The top pension is Herbert Rosenthal at $181,632. Retiring in 1998, Rosenthal’s career spanned 35-years, but he’s already been retired for 18-years.

The golden state of government pension largess just might collapse under its own weight. Recently, CalPERS projected that there’s up to a one in three chance of entering a ‘crisis point’ of doomsday underfunding sometime in the next 30 years.

Still, there may some hope and relief coming soon. In August, a San Francisco based state appellate court held that reasonable benefit cuts are permissible in the pension system.

As is the case in pensions systems across the country, CalPERS shows that handing out lavish benefits to everyone – or the many – creates retirement security for no one.

Note: Recently at Forbes, we showcased the 220,000 currently active California public employees making over $100,000 and costing taxpayers $35 billion each year.

Adam Andrzejewski (say: Angie-F-Ski) is the founder and CEO of OpenTheBooks.com.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: California Highway Patrol, CalPERS, Los Angeles Sanitary District, OpenTheBooks.com, Public pensions