Jerry Brown has burnished an image of frugality. Now it’s time for him to truly earn it.
The governor should come clean with the public and truly address California’s mounting retirement debt rather than passing it on to future generations.
Brown deserves credit for ending massive annual state budget deficits he inherited. And he wisely pushed for establishment of reserves, however meager, to help cushion the blow of the next recession, for which he correctly warns we are overdue.
But during his tenure the state’s retirement debt has soared. The shortfall for pensions and retiree health care benefits state workers have already earned officially stands at $200 billion. It’s actually much more. And it doesn’t include the debt of local governments.
But even that official number works out to more than $15,700 for each California household. Make no mistake Californians, you, your children and your grandchildren will have to pay the debt either through higher taxes in the future or reduced public services.
Worse, we’re accumulating new debt every day as employees continue working and earning more future benefits. It wouldn’t be an issue if the state’s retirement systems charged enough in upfront contributions. Unfortunately, they continue to rely instead on unrealistic investment return forecasts.
It’s not that Brown has ignored these problems; he just hasn’t done enough to solve them. While he made political hay out of his so-called pension reform of 2012, which was merely a tweak to a badly broken system, he has been unwilling to spend political capital to truly fix it.
For the shortfall in state workers’ retiree health care program, Brown has negotiated with labor unions a plan that may or may not pay off the debt over three decades.
The unnecessarily complicated scheme doesn’t bind future lawmakers and state workers to stick with it. It relies unrealistically on investment returns. And the debt payoff is back-loaded so that payments will increase over time.
That places unfair burden on future generations of taxpayers, and makes the plan more vulnerable to market downturns and rapid escalations in health care costs.
As for pensions, Brown’s finance director last month negotiated a backroom deal with labor leaders to reduce CalPERS’ dependency on market returns. But it will take seven years to implement and ignores expert advice by continuing to use overly optimistic investment return forecasts.
Like his pension “reform” and his plan to pay off retiree health care debt, Brown’s touting of the CalPERS deal was like the football player who reaches the 40-yard line, spikes the ball and claims to have scored a touchdown.
It’s time for the governor to go all the way rather than fumbling away the game.
