California’s Split Personality
Call it a tale of two states. On the one hand, California is briskly creating private-sector jobs, led by a Silicon Valley hiring spree. Sacramento’s budget, deeply in the red just a few years ago, is running a surplus, thanks to big income gains by the state’s wealthy residents. Meanwhile, however, large areas of the […]
California Democrats Want the State’s Overdrawn Pension Systems to Dump Their Fossil-Fuel Stocks
California’s two mammoth public-pension funds—the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS)—are short a shocking $225 billion that they’re going to need to pay for the retirements of government workers. But what is it about the two pension funds that worries the state’s Democratic Party? Their fossil-fuel investments. […]
Why the State and Local Pension Problem Will Get Worse
When unions agreed to a deal last month with Detroit city government to freeze the city’s underfunded pension system and create a new, less expensive one, some experts hailed it as a model that other troubled cities might adopt. News reports prominently mentioned governments with deep retirement debt, including Chicago and Philadelphia, as candidates for […]
Who Decides How Much Unions May Charge Non-Members?
As Dan DiSalvo notes below, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Harris v. Quinn, in which several home health care workers in Illinois who have refused to join the Service Employees International Union object to being forced to pay a so-called “agency fee” to the union for representation. As Dan’s analysis and this one on […]
Riordan’s Federal Pension Bailout
Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who has been a prescient critic of current state and local pension plans, published a piece earlier this week in the New York Times with former journalist Tim Rutten proposing a federal bailout of state and local pension plans. No doubt the Times was happy to get a prominent […]
California to Business: Get Out!
Crossposted City Journal Last year, a medical-technology firm called Numira Biosciences, founded in 2005 in Irvine, California, packed its bags and moved to Salt Lake City. The relocation, CEO Michael Beeuwsaert told the Orange County Register, was partly about the Utah destination’s pleasant quality of life and talented workforce. But there was a big “push […]