“While the comment that these individuals paid into the funds is valid and those individuals deserve to see what they put into the system plus appropriate earning……. some blame must be directed at those who had a fiduciary responsibility to protect those funds. Who are those people and why have they not be charged? I guess the Union Bosses were asleep when that was happening or did they think they would just ‘go along to get along’? Yes, the legislators robbed the funds and now they seek to rob the municipal pensions to prop up the robbed pensions. As to the “underpaying careers ” ……That is not accurate when you compare 4-year degrees against other 4-year degree careers – you cannot just pick and choose those careers that pay more and ignore those that don’t. And look at the progression they and the unions put in place to make sure they are well paid. Once these individuals are in the system, they are protected WELL and practically can never be fired…….. even if they don’t produce. “
the staff of the Ridgewood blog with a little help from readers
Ridgewood NJ, The Status Report of the New Jersey Pension and Health Benefit Study Commission issued on September 25, 2014 all but said NJ Governors beginning with Whitman stole the pension money to buy votes with many pet projects with the following statements…..
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Page 3) Both public employees and taxpayers as a whole, however, have been poorly served by a long-standing and bipartisan tradition of increasing benefit levels without adequate funding. Successive Governors and State Legislatures have committed the State to providing these benefits based on relatively optimistic financial assumptions without adequate consideration of the long-term costs to taxpayers if economic reality were to fall short of these assumptions.
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Page 6) the failure of the State to make required pension contributions when they have been due has made a bad situation much worse. Local governments participate in the same plans but have made more of their required payments with greater regularity, resulting in the local government share of the funds having a funded ratio of 75%, compared to the State’s 54% funded ratio.11 Under-funding the State’s share of the plans has been consistent under the stewardship of both major parties, as shown by the chart on the following page:
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Page 6) All that being said, however, the failure of the State to make required pension contributions when they have been due has made a bad situation much worse. Local governments participate in the same plans but have made more of their required payments with greater regularity, resulting in the local government share of the funds having a funded ratio of 75%, compared to the State’s 54% funded ratio.11 Under-funding the State’s share of the plans has been consistent under the stewardship of both major parties, as shown by the chart on the following page:
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Page 15) As the table below indicates, largely due to the extremely high investment returns of the late 1990s, at the turn of the century the funded ratio of the plans based on actuarial values approached or exceeded 100%, even during the 2000-02 economic downturn. However, the apparent resiliency of the plans during that downturn is misleading. The actuarial asset values are rolling multi-year averages. For some time after the flush years of high returns, those averages continued to reflect high actuarial asset values for those years even though the market value of the assets was declining. Statutory changes also increased the expected rate of return from 7% to 8.75% and modified the actuarial funding method to allocate more costs to future years, thereby reducing the apparent value of the liabilities. This further reinforced the misperception that the plans were safely and permanently in surplus.
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he reported asset values and statutory changes enabled the State, in full compliance with the standards then in place, to discontinue making contributions to the funds. While there were clear warnings then that this could lead to huge fiscal problems in the future, at the time it permitted hundreds of millions of dollars to be diverted to other purposes ranging from education to tax relief. Compounding the problem, during the years when the pension plans were apparently well-funded (but actually lapsing into deficits), the Legislature enacted a series of benefit enhancements, including a retroactive 9% increase in TPAF and PERS pensions in 2001, which increased State pension liabilities by $4.2 billion.35
. https://www.state.nj.us/treasury/pdf/NJPHBSC.pdf
ask Jim Mac Greevey where the pension money went ?
Reader asks so where did all that money from the pension piggy bank go if it didn’t balance budgets ?
Maybe if our Past Governors didn’t use the government employees pension systems as their personal piggy banks without repaying what they took, and if the municipalities and state actually paid in what they were suppose to there wouldn’t be a pension funding problem.Your State income taxes are about to go up even higher.
Whitman, McGreevy and Corzine played serious games with pension funds. But the health care benefits are an even bigger liability than the unfunded pension liability, $59bn vs $47bn. That’s over $100bn in unfunded promises made. Taxes may be going up, but benefits will have to be reduced, too, it’s not a one way street. Here’s a good question: We already have the second highest state and local taxes in the country vs,. one of the largest unfunded pension liabilities, so where did all that money from the pension piggy bank go if it didn’t balance budgets ?
