[x0x0]

While I'm with you on prop 13, we combine high income taxes with exceptionally low property taxes for long term property holders. Again, if we want nice things, we have to pay for them.

As for pensions, you say unsustainable promises, I say stealing from people who took cash later instead of cash immediately. Consider your last boss deciding to reach into your checking account and take $40k out because the business retroactively decided they overpaid.

According to this http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2016CAbs_1... pensions are 36.9/208.2 = 18% of the state budget.

[bradleyjg]

The point is that the politicians back then stole from the future. If they were going to promise cash in the future the should have set aside money back then to pay for it.

It's one thing when a government borrows money to pay for a capital project that will last long after they are out of office. The net present value of an accruing pension is an operating cost and should be paid for as the obligation is incurred.

[maxerickson]

It's possible to be unhappy with underfunded pensions and also think it would be unfair to change them retroactively.

[gozur88]

>As for pensions, you say unsustainable promises, I say stealing from people who took cash later instead of cash immediately.

This is really an accounting problem. In California, at least, changes to the pension system weren't reflected in the current budget as future obligations.

So for many years city and state controllers dealt with union demands by "off the books borrowing" in the form of more lavish pensions. City and state pensions really are unnecessarily lavish, and the reason is voters never realized what obligations they were being asked to shoulder.