When it comes to the gaping abyss that is public employee pension and health care unfunded liabilities, Democrats continue to try to obscure reality at all costs. At a dinner meeting earlier this week, the smokescreen was so thick that I actually had to interrupt Orange County Democrat Party Chairman Frank Barbaro, who was participating in a panel discussion at a meeting of city electeds and city managers.

Barbaro had just said, “We hear about the outrageous public employee pensions, but do you know what the average pension for a retired public employee under the CalPERS system is? It’s just $22,000 a year.”

“What is the average for CalPERS-covered public employees who retired last year?” I asked in a voice that all in the room could hear.

He seemed shocked by the interruption, but feigned ignorance.  “I don’t know, what was it?

“It was $60,000 a year, and it will be going up every year from now on until pensions are controlled. That’s the pension cost the people in this room are concerned about,” I said as some City officials applauded and others nodded their heads in approval.

You have to call these people out.  You have to say you’re not putting up with their papering over of the problem, even if, as in this case, their response is to go back to the lame Dem message points, pretending the real facts simply don’t exist. Against that context, here’s the intro to my most recent Daily Caller column, covering a bit of reality Democrats wish they could ignore, that California now leads the nation in public employee pension fund losses, but in terms of total losses and percentage of fund losses:

California, once a state that could easily justify the adjective “golden,” nowadays seems to always find itself at the bottom of lists Californians would rather be at the top of — like quality of education — and at the top of lists they’d like to be at the bottom of — like the most recent: largest public employee pension fund losses.

The data is from a pretty reliable source — the U.S. Census Bureau — and it shows California lost $136 billion in 2009, or 21.2 percent of the total national losses in public employee pension fund assets. The state has 12 percent of the nation’s population and 18 percent of all state pension fund assets — which in itself is a sign of how comfortably the state’s public servants will spend their retirement years.

The one-year loss equals $3,677 for every man, woman and child in the state — and since we’re on the hook for any shortfalls, that’s a bill that could come due. Heaven forbid that public employees would ever be asked to accept pension cuts like the poor folks who must work to produce something other than taxes, fines and regulations.

Please make Peter, the opinion editor at the Daily Caller, happy by clicking through to read the rest.
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