David Crane does a very nice dissection of California’s failure to manage its pension obligations, and how that has built into a $200-300 billion debt. And still growing.
one of the sad ironies of today’s state budget debate is that some of the same
politicians who are outraged at the plan to cut expenditures in
order to close today’s deficit voted in 1999 for that bill that
retroactively and prospectively boosted pension promises, the effect
of which was to issue billions of dollars of new obligations that
can only be paid by — you guessed it — taking money from the very
programs they’re outraged now about cutting.