Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXV

TARP was awful and the GM-Chrysler bailout was terrible, but those wretched pieces of legislation would be surpassed by something even more reprehensible if politicians signed on to this terrible idea to bail out the bloated pension plans of state and local government bureaucrats. If this happens, I hope taxpayers respond with massive civil disobedience when it comes to paying taxes. Here is an excerpt from the Financial Times:

Illinois used to have a plan to pay off the gaping shortfall in the pension funds that pay retired teachers, university employees, state workers, judges and politicians, Dan Long recalls. Mr Long, director of the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability, the non-partisan auditing arm of the Illinois state legislature, remembers that, back in 1994, the state laid out a proposal that would have paid off most of what was then a $17bn gap by 2011. ...Illinois is the poster child of unfunded pensions in the US. But state retirement systems could become a national concern, new research shows. Joshua Rauh, associate professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University said that, without reform, some state pensions might run out within the decade. ...if these funds exhaust their assets, the size of payments for the benefits they have promised will be too large to cover through taxes, putting pressure on the federal government for a bail-out that could potentially cost more than $1,000bn, he says. “It is more than a local problem,” Mr Rauh said. “The federal government could be on the hook.” Estimates put the unfunded liabilities at between $1,000bn and $3,000bn after years of states promising benefits but not contributing enough in both good times and bad to cover them. ...States have begun reforms, with some lowering return expectations and raising employee contributions and retirement ages. Mr Rauh said such measures were cosmetic and states needed comprehensive, federally sponsored reform that would require closing the systems to new members, shifting state workers to Social Security and individual plans similar to those that are used by the private sector in order to obtain incentives to borrow to bridge the gaps.