It costs money to run government. Employees need to be paid. We have had lay offs when budgets were constrained. The funding per pupil has steadily decreased the last 30 years and hence tuition has similarly increased. Our salaries relative to purchasing power has decreased over this time.

Exactly. So one group of state government employees (your state's DoE) meets another group of state government employees (your union) and decide to give each other an incredible defined-benefit pension deal that nobody outside of government can even dream of.

State government employees are giving each other dream pension plans, that are unsustainable and wildly over-budget even if they were well-managed (which generally they are not).

You know why nobody outside government has defined benefit pensions? Because they were proven to be unsustainable decades ago. Yet government employees keep conferring them upon themselves.

Then, when the inevitable deficit arises, as any economist would predict, you have a great solution: me and my peers in the private sectors should pay more taxes to bankroll your party!

I hope this slow-motion trainwreck would be a wakeup call, but either way, know this: there is no amount of taxes that will prop up your unsustainable pension plans. State and local governments wasted billions mismanaging these funds, that are unsustainable even under the best management.

Any more taxes you collect will just fuel this fire for a couple more years, before the inevitable next crisis arises.

You can't fix fiscal irresponsibility with more money, because all that money (and no accountability) is what created fiscal irresponsibility in the first place!

Your state government needs to start applying the same basic fiscal responsibility that every single business in your state is adhering to.

My pension plan is not a good one. You characterization of one group of state employees giving a dream set of benefits to another is not based in reality. Administration does not negotiate strongly with us the contract won't be approved by the legislature or signed by the governor. Our wages relative to buying power has not been going up or remaining steady.

If pensions are inherently unsustainable then you must conclude that it is unsustainable for a society to care for itself.

How do you figure?

It is unsustainable for us to support all people over e.g. 60. But we can support the 5% over 60 who really need the support and can't look after themselves.

Please read the link I posted above:

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/retirement/10/demise-d...

Defined Cost pensions are sustainable. That's what we in the private sector have: 401k and Roth.

Defined Benefit pensions aren't sustainable. That's why nobody outside of government has them, and the ones sponsored by the government suffer huge deficits and are slowly but surely edging towards bankruptcy.

We are all to blame (if you are older than about 25).

Collectively, we have known the pensions are unsustainable for at least the last 40 years.

Yet we have refused to face the problem head on and vote in people who will fix it. Instead we push the problems onto the next generations.

Teacher unions are also responsible for keeping bad teachers employeed. See NYC rubber rooms.

That's the key point. Budget broken so we can't pay for something? Let's talk about putting money in. Systemic problem where the people making decisions about spending the money are the same people receiving benefits? You can't write a check to fix that. This isn't a traditional "how much do we tax and what do we spend our money on?" public policy discussion.

Systemic problems are another kind of problem entirely. They deserve and require non-partisan attention and discussion.

There's simply no reason to believe that throwing more money at these systemic problems will fix them. In fact, it may well exacerbate them instead.

California has, along the US states, a fairly moderate pension issue measured per capita or per GDP. It has big absolute numbers, as with nearly every other issue, because it's a very big state.

A more important question is how much room to manoeuvre does California have?

If California increases taxes by 5% to fix the issue how many businesses and highly paid employees will leave?

That's very hard to say.

> If California increases taxes by 5% to fix the issue how many businesses and highly paid employees will leave?

Even if it was a simple as taxes being a single number where distribution of the taxes doesn't matter, there's no consensus on the average effect of increases. And, in reality the distribution probably matters intensely.

(And, of course, taxes aren't the only lever; maybe California instead radically cuts back on mass incarceration; to the extent that California has less room to maneuver in taxes it has more on spending, which in some ways is better for this purpose—spending cuts tend to also inherently reduce the rate at which the problem is made worse, before you even consider how the savings are applied. Either spending or tax, though, may take ballot action or legislative supermajority, because much of State spending in CA is programmed by Constitution/ballot measure, and tax increases can't be done with a simple legislative majority.)

Also, no reason to believe just 5% will fix the issue.

There is no such thing on significt public policy issues; if it matters, and there are different opinions, it will become partisan.