{"id":412275,"date":"2010-03-10T14:42:10","date_gmt":"2010-03-10T19:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reuters.com\/james-pethokoukis\/?p=3476"},"modified":"2010-03-10T14:42:10","modified_gmt":"2010-03-10T19:42:10","slug":"california-screaming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/412275","title":{"rendered":"California Screaming"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are some fun facts about California’s fiscal situation, in light of state college students protesting a 32 percent tuition hike (via WSJ<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

1) In 1999, the Democratic legislature ran a reckless gamble that makes Wall Street’s bankers look cautious. At the top of a bull market, they assumed their investment returns would grow at a 8.25% rate in perpetuity\u2014equivalent to assuming that the Dow would reach 25,000 by 2009\u2014and enacted a huge pension boon for public-safety and industrial unions.<\/p>\n

2) It let firefighters retire at age 50 and receive 3% of their final year’s compensation times the number of years they worked. If a firefighter started working at the age of 20, he could retire at 50 and earn 90% of his final salary, in perpetuity<\/p>\n

3) In 2002, the state legislature further extended benefits to many nonsafety classifications, such as milk and billboard inspectors. More than 15,000 public employees have retired with annual pensions greater than $100,000.<\/p>\n

4) In the last decade, government worker pension costs (not including health care) have risen to $3 billion from $150 million, a 2,000% jump, while state revenues have increased by 24%.<\/p>\n

5) This year alone $3 billion was diverted from other programs to fund pensions, including more than $800 million from the UC system.<\/p>\n

6) The governor’s office projects that over the next decade the annual taxpayer contributions to retiree pensions and health care will grow to $15 billion from $5.5 billion, and that’s assuming the stock market doubles every 10 years. With unfunded pension and health-care liabilities totaling more than $122 billion, California will continue chopping at higher-ed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are some fun facts about California’s fiscal situation, in light of state college students protesting a 32 percent tuition hike (via WSJ): 1) In 1999, the Democratic legislature ran a reckless gamble that makes Wall Street’s bankers look cautious. At the top of a bull market, they assumed their investment returns would grow at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1063,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-412275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1063"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}