Steven Greenhut on the Demographic Changes Threatening Pensions

In a 2011
profile about California’s ongoing fiscal mess, Vanity
Fair interviewed San Jose’s then-Mayor Chuck Reed, a
progressive Democrat who has for years been warning about coming
cuts in public services if the state’s pension systems don’t get
benefit levels under control. Reed did the math and the picture
wasn’t pretty. “By 2014, Reed had calculated, a city of a million
people, the 10th-largest city in the United States, would be
serviced by 1,600 public workers,” according to the piece. “The
problem was going to grow worse until, as he put it, ‘you get to
one.’ A single employee to service the entire city, presumably with
a focus on paying pensions.” But while San Jose and other cities
will never literally reach a single employee who sits in the room
mailing out pension checks, the trajectory is headed in that
troubling direction. Now, writes Steven Greenhut, even the
California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the nation’s
largest pension fund and one of the state’s most adamant opponents
of pension reform, released a report in November that
bolster’s Reed’s case.

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