The House State Government Committee has plans for a hearing on the governor's pension reform proposals Wednesday morning, less than two weeks before lawmakers expect to take heir summer vacations after the state budget deadline, June 30. That leaves little time for lawmakers to enact a major overhaul of the two pension systems.

While almost all states faced pension funding issues during the recession, none of them are looking at a predicament as severe as in Illinois. Every day it doesn't get fixed, the burden on taxpayers grows larger.

There are persistent fiscal and demographic challenges in most states. The public sector workforce is aging as the baby boom cohort moves towards and into traditional retirement ages. Budgetary pressures at the state and local level make it difficult to increase plan funding and maintain the size of the public sector workforce.

States cannot pretend to be in good financial health unless they tackle pensions.

More states will create hybrid plans in the future because of the less-volatile contribution levels and the fact that the defined contribution components are portable for a workforce that is now increasingly more mobile, according to a new report.

The size of unfunded retiree healthcare liabilities varies widely by state. While some states have been making slow progress towards pre-funding these obligations, other have been contributing to them on a pay-as-you-go basis. As a result of the latter approach, combined unfunded liabilities are $425 billion under the most optimistic assumptions.

Attorney General Lisa Madigan says it's absurd to think that her father, House Speaker Mike Madigan, is delaying pension reform to help her in a race for governor.

Fox Business News relied on new analysis based on the methodology by Bob Williams and the SBS team to determine that the problems California cities face are largely due to soaring employee retirement costs.

Oklahoma Treasurer Ken Miller defends Gov. Mary Fallin's veto this year of a pension bill that the governor says was merely window dressing.

Gov. Pat Quinn has called lawmakers back into session to try to deal with the state's unfunded pension obligation. But expectations are low for a resolution, even though Democrats control both chambers and the state's credit rating is taking a beating.

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.

This report summarizes selected state pensions and retirement legislation enacted in 2012.

This report describes state retirement plans that depart from the traditional public sector model of defined benefit (DB) plans.

This document provides links to resources provided by other organizations on state pensions and retirement issues. Also included are links to many state-specific studies from recent years, which constitute important contributions to the national debate on public retirement systems' structures and funding.

It might seem improbable that huge unfunded liabilities would be proffered as the reason not to adopt alternatives designed to prevent new unfunded liabilities. And yet, this claim has effectively stymied reform in state after state.

Wisconsin's public pension system demonstrates how big the public pension catastrophe really is. 

This compilation of state defined benefit, defined contribution, and hybrid plans includes plans that cover general state employees and teachers in K-12 education (although some of the plans counted here may cover additional categories of employees).

This study uses an international pension fund database to compare the asset allocation and liability discount rates of public and non-public funds in the U.S., Canada and Europe. We document that U.S. public funds exploit the opaque incentives provided by their distinct regulatory environment and behave very differently from U.S. corporate funds and both public and non-public pension funds in Canada and Europe. In the past two decades, U.S. public funds uniquely increased their allocation to riskier investment strategies in order to maintain high discount rates and present lower liabilities, especially if their proportion of retired members increased more. In line with economic theory, all other groups of pension funds reduced their allocation to risky assets as they mature, and lowered discount rates as riskless interest rates declined. The arguably camouflaging and risky behavior of U.S. public pension plans seems driven by the conflict of interest between current and future stakeholders, and could result in significant costs to future workers and taxpayers.  Find the full study here.

The Public Pension Disclosure Task Force, convened by NABL, released on May 17, 2012, its considerations for preparing an official statement on disclosure regarding pension funding obligations. The pension funding obligations of state and local governments have received increased attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission, investors, and the news media. In response, the participants in the municipal finance market came together and agreed on guidance for municipal bond issuers and those who assist the issuers so that investors will have all the material information they need to make informed investment decisions.

The U.S. Census collects key data from selected state and municipal pension funds every year. State Budget Solutions consolidated the data for the 222 largest state administered defined benefit pension funds from fiscal years 2007 through 2010 to present an overview of each state's pension funds.  See how your state is doing.

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.