Tag: Public Pensions

Barely three months after the state Legislature approved a $2.3 billion package of tax and fee hikes to bail out the financially troubled Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), members of the MTA's largest union have been awarded a pay increase that will break the authority's tenuously balanced budget. Read More

New York state’s pension system lost 26 percent on its investments and shrunk by a net $45 billion in fiscal 2008-09, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli disclosed last week. Read More

New York’s public-pension system has become the epicenter of an in fluence-peddling scandal that has at tracted the attention of the SEC as well as state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. But the millions in shady “placement fees” pocketed by a few politically connected middlemen are small change compared with the mushrooming cost of lavish pension benefits for state and local government retirees. Read More

Before staggering away from Albany last week, the state Senate delivered a pleasant surprise for taxpayers -- rejecting a well-intentioned but badly designed bill that would have allowed the state and local governments to borrow billions from the state pension system while potentially compounding financial risks for generations to come. Read More

New York’s public-pension system has become the epicenter of an influence-peddling scandal that has attracted the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the state’s attorney general. Read More

All 59 of the public retirement systems covering most teachers in the United States—including both of New York’s—face pension obligations far greater than they admit, according to a newly issued study from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the Foundation for Educational Choice. The study estimates the total unfunded liabilities of the nation’s teacher plans at $933 billion, nearly three times the officially acknowledged shortfall, including a funding gap of more than $60 billion in the two New York systems. Read More