It’s sort of amazing that when I point out that the NYC teacher pension fund is only 55 percent funded based on optimistic assumptions (compared with 100 percent funded for teachers in the rest of the state) and the money that had been set aside for retiree health care is about to be fully spent to paper over city budget problems, no one chimes in and asks why the union had allowed that to happen.
Perhaps because those who got retroactive pension enhancements had in fact raided the pension fund themselves, and while pretending there was no problem for years made things much worse it also created some separation between the deals and the consequences, aiding rationalization. And others are expected to suffer.
From the Times.
As one example of the budget pressures cities are facing, Mayor Stephanie A. Miner of Syracuse said her city’s annual pension costs had increased 50 percent since she took office in 2010, to $30 million from $20 million. “If you say to the municipality, ‘You’re just going to have to figure out how to pay for it,’ what you are saying is that now bad people aren’t going to be arrested, fires aren’t going to be put out,” she said. “Snow will not be plowed from the roads. Trash will not be collected. And where are we going as a society if we cannot provide those basic, essential services?”
To Florida, in victory, (in NYC) AGAIN?
Flerp
I second Brent’s recommendation of the math museum. My son loved it.
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