Depressing (But Important!) Website of the Day
It's Pension Tsumami! Which bums you out right there on the front page:
The purpose of this site is to provide an overview of the multiple pension crises that are about to drown America's taxpayers.
It's a project of the Fullerton Association of Concerned Taxpayers, or FACT. The primary benefit of the site so far comes in its linking to more than a half dozen depressing pension pieces per day. Such as this Sacramento Bee editorial, which is yet another bit to bookmark next time some Golden State schmo starts badgering Washington for a bailout:
[T]op staffers in the state Assembly walked away from their jobs last month with richer pensions that are likely to cost taxpayers a bundle.
How much? No one knows. Neither the Department of Finance nor the Legislature's own budget staff analyzed the bill. Assembly officials who drafted the pension deal insist it will save money, but they refuse to release their fiscal analysis that shows how.
The deal provided two years of extra service credit to anyone who was at least 50 years old and had worked five years in the Assembly. For a 55-year-old Assembly employee with 30 years at the state, it added about $4,000 a year extra to retirement pay.
The Tsunami also links to this immediately valuable and depressing blog, called Pension Pulse, in which former pension fund analyst Leo Kolivakis tells us from Canada about the "Pension Pandemic" that will soon infect us all.
Tsunami link via Seeking Alpha, by way of Instapundit. And don't miss our cover story from February, Jon Entine's "The Next Catastrophe."