Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is insisting that Gov. Cuomo “negotiate” his plans to reform New York’s outdated pension systems with the public-employee unions — which misses the biggest point of reform. Read More
Tag: Public Pensions
Seventy-one percent of New York State’s public school teachers support giving new teachers a choice between a defined-contribution retirement plan and a traditional defined-benefit pension, according to a statewide poll conducted for the Empire Center for Public Policy. Read More
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's hype machine went into overdrive late last week after the Legislature passed a scaled-back version of his Tier 6 pension reform plan. Read More
During New York's Tier 6 pension-reform fight earlier this year, public employee unions claimed Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo wanted to "let Wall Street gamble" with pension money. Last week brought a reminder of who's really rolling the dice. State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced that the pool of investments backing the New York State and Local Retirement System (NYSLRS), of which he is sole trustee, earned 5.96 percent during the fiscal year ended March 31. Read More
New York politicians should heed the message of this week's Wisconsin recall election: You can defy the public-sector labor machine and live to tell the tale. Read More
Ninety-five out of 933 state Police and Fire Retirement System (PFRS) members who retired in 2011 qualified for a pension of more than $100,000, according to data posted at SeeThroughNY.net, the Empire Center’s government transparency website. Read More
New York taxpayers spend billions of dollars a year on health insurance coverage for retired state and local government employees, many of whom are too young to be eligible for Medicare. But the mounting “pay-as-you-go” bill for retiree healthcare is just the tip of a much larger iceberg. Read More
The state's largest public union is right. Gov. Andrew Cuomo's proposal to "smooth" pensions for local governments and school districts is "a bait-and-switch scheme ... that will allow public employers to underfund their pension obligations," as the Civil Service Employees Association described it last week. Read More