Local governments are borrowing $368 million to pay for pension costs this year, an 81 percent increase from 2012, state records show.

House Speaker Andy Tobin is pushing a proposal to vastly revise the Elected Officials Retirement Plan, which now allows everyone from local officials to legislators and the governor to retire after 20 years at 80 percent of their highest pay - nearly double the benefit offered to most other public employees in the Arizona State Retirement System.

The state Retirement Board unanimously adopted its consultant's annual report on pension valuations on Wednesday, meaning that taxpayers' contributions to the retirement system will increase from $380.3 million next fiscal year to $404.5 million in FY2014.

A consortium of groups opposing a House bill that would close the state's pension program to new public employees continued to rally on Wednesday in saying lawmakers should leave good enough alone.

Individual records held by the state's public pension systems - including the one that state lawmakers pay into - have an airtight exemption from the landmark 1973 sunshine law that was designed to let taxpayers know how public money is being spent.

Maryland Treasurer Nancy Kopp on Tuesday stressed the need to move away from a system that has chronically underfunded state pensions, a concern of credit-rating agencies that have given the state its coveted AAA bond rating.

With the economy still stagnating, a few powerful voices have begun pressuring already underfunded pension funds to help kickstart local economies, acting as venture capital investors. Fund managers are not amused.

While most public-sector actuaries support GASB's methodology, Novy-Marx notes, "academic economists almost unanimously disagree."

A bill placing all new state employees in a 401(k)-style retirement plan passed a House subcommittee on a party-line vote Thursday, setting up a major showdown between legislative Republicans and public workers' unions.

The proposal would create a 401(k)-like hybrid retirement plan for new employees and would eliminate cost-of-living increases for retirees already drawing benefits in an effort to deal with a $33 billion deficit.

To be fully funded, Delaware must increase its annual contribution to the pension system based on a market valuation of plan liabilities. This paper analyzes Delaware’s pension system on a fair-market or government- guaranteed basis, with reference to the average US Treasury rate on 10- and 20-year bonds in June 2012. A discussion of the discrepancy between current government accounting conventions and the fair-market value approach and the implications for plan management follows.

Wilshire Consulting estimates that the ratio of pension assets-to-liabilities, or funding ratio, for all 134 state pension plans was 73% in 2012, down from an estimated 77% in 2011. This deterioration in funding ratio was fueled by global stock market volatility in the twelve months ending June 30, 2012. Growth in fund assets could not keep up with growth in plan liabilities over fiscal 2012.

Was the slow recovery of the U.S. economy from the trough of the Great Recession anticipated? 

Alternative views on the problem the United States is facing: financing retirement consumption as its population ages.

Recent years have witnessed intense pension reform efforts in countries around the globe, often involving an increased use of funded pension programmes managed by the private sector. These funded arrangements are likely to play an increasingly important role in delivering retirement income in many countries and privately managed pension assets will play an increasing role in financial markets, notably as a source of long-term savings.

Published annually since 2005 by the The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development  (OECD) Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs, Pension Markets in Focus provides accurate, comprehensive, comparable and up-to-date statistics to help policy makers, regulators and market participants measure, compare and evaluate programme developments and country experiences globally.

Calculation of the increases in contributions required to achieve full funding of state and local pension
systems in the U.S. over 30 years. Without policy changes, contributions must increase by a factor of 2.5, reaching 14.1% of the total own-revenue generated by state and local governments.
This represents a tax increase of $1,385 per household per year.

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. Thanks to a new government accounting standard, the true cost of this long-term entitlement is finally emerging from the depths of state and local finances.

Unfunded employee pension obligations will present a serious fiscal problem to state and local governments in the not too distant future. This article takes a looks at the causes and potential cures for the public pension mess, mainly through the lens of legal doctrines that limit public employers' ability to avoid obligations.

Girard Miller's presentation at the National Conference of State Legislators in Chicago August 2012.

If public pension fund assets were indexed to relevant markets rather than actively managed, the public pension systems in Maryland and across the united States would save enormous amounts of money on fees, without undue harm to investment performance.

The goal is to enact systemic change and create a climate for long-term solvency for Kentucky's public pensions. This requires changing the very structure of the system while providing the minimum amount of one-time immediate funding to stave off bankruptcy in the state employees’ fund. Steps also must be taken to set in place policies that will enable the commonwealth to avoid such pension crises in the future.

There are three important lessons from the Wisconsin collective bargaining battles over the past eighteen months:

1. The power of the government-sector unions and their impact on elections is greatly overestimated. With the November 2012 victory for  Senate Republicans to regain control of the Wisconsin Senate,  government employee union  suffered their sixth  major defeat since March 2011.

2. When given a choice, government employees will quit their union in large numbers.

3. Government employees' salaries and benefits, particularly pensions, are financially unsustainable in most states and collective bargaining reform is needed.

The time for state and local governments to offer defined contribution retirement plans that protect both taxpayer dollars and public employee retirement security is now.

This paper examines the ongoing fiscal crisis caused by health-care plans for retirees (known as "other post-employment benefits," or OPEB) in one of the hardest-hit states, California, and outlines necessary reforms that should come before tax increases or cuts to government services.

In June 2012, nearly 70% of San Jose voters approved "Measure B" - a set of pension reforms that the City Council placed on the ballot after more than 8 months of negotiations with our employee unions.

In numerous measurable ways, North Carolina's pension benefits are more generous than those offered in the private sector and most other states. Financial and demographic trends point toward rapidly increasing obligations in the near- and long-term future. Sensible reforms that bring North Carolina's pension benefits more on par with those of other states and the private sector are needed to avoid a massive taxpayer bailout of the pension fund.

Public pensions at the state and municipal levels are unsustainable in their current form.  State Budget Solutions' recent study by Andrew Biggs found that public pensions are underfunded by $4.6 trilion. Here we offer solutions to the pension crisis

Proposal for reforming Maine's pension plans, including freezing pensions for three years (2011 - 2013), identical to the state employee salary freeze, and ensuring reasonable increases in pensions after that, close to the historical norm of 2.8% annually, based on CPI (inflation), but capped at 2% (currently capped at 4%).

Sound pension reform meets four general criteria: (1) establish transparency with respect to the true cost of the benefits promised to public employees; (2) mandate that the pension plan sponsor pay the full cost of accrued benefits each year; (3) mandate that the pension plan sponsor pay down the unfunded accrued liability over a reasonable time horizon and (4) improve the generational equity, portability and security of benefits for public employees.

Paper suggesting Virginia move toward a combined retirement program that includes partially a defined benefits program and added to this should be a defined contributions program. Such a balanced system would make the Commonwealth’s costs lower and more predictable while providing attractive benefits to employees.