The giant sucking sound of state pensions

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What Colorado is doing by not solving its public pension problem

For those of you that don’t remember that Republican State Treasurer’s Primary last year, the candidates tried to make Colorado’s insolvent pension called PERA sexy. Don’t remember that primary?… Guess it wasn’t too sexy…

However the Treasurer’s race wasn’t…

So why should you care? Simply put, it’s not just sucking up the state budget (the unfunded liabilities may be as large as 2 times the state budget), but it is also sucking up school budgets as well.

We can get into the debate of whether Colorado adequately or over adequately funds schools (it’s the latter), but for the purposes of this article we’re going to talk about the non-sexy issue of public pensions.

This article from the lefty organization The Hechinger Report shows the drain of PERA on Colorado schools. The legislature has been lax to take up real reforms. The general expectation (we think) is they want to kick-the-can down the road until the note is due. Most likely current politicians in power won’t be around when this happens.

This article cites that PERA is $29 billion (yes billion with a “b”) underfunded. Some estimates have PERA as $60 billion underfunded (Executive Summary paragraph 3). If it’s the latter, then that’s about $10,000 for every man, woman, and child in Colorado. That’s a big deal, and as baby boomer teachers retire, and people live longer this number will grow.

So if you don’t want PERA sucking up large portions of school budgets while current and future taxpayers are on the hook for $10k a piece – you should put pressure on your local legislator to do something instead of the band-aid proposals that have been passed in the last 2 decades.

So, to draw in the teachers’ union hacks so we get more website traffic (and to contradict the assertions in the article we disagree with) – teachers are well compensated here in Colorado. 9 months of REQUIRED work, average salary north of $60,000 not including pension benefits, health care, and days off to go do political things for the union. Please comment below and share with your union friends!!!

PERA is a sacred cow for not just school unions but for many other public employees in Colorado. That’s what makes this an impossible issue to solve when most Dems (some Republicans are scared of the unions as well) are bought and paid for by the unions.

Let’s just pass Right to Work, and be done with this!

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5 thoughts on “The giant sucking sound of state pensions

  1. I would like to know where you got the salary figure of 60k for teachers in Colorado. I want to cite the source accurately.
    Thank you.

  2. Public employees pay into PERA so that they can have a retirement pension. They don’t get Social Security. If they do get SS they have to take a big cut in it. But public employees worked for the retirement they get.

  3. I agree with the above statements. I never made $60,000 even after 35 years of teaching. Teachers are not the only ones on PERA, state patrol and judges are also on this retirement plan. We all paid into it and we don’t collect SS or we take a huge cut on our AS ,even when we paid into it also.

  4. I read on a news source yesterday PERA lost 1.8 billion dollars in last years stock market. Is that possible?

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