September 17, 2016
The NYT seems determined to do the equivalent of birtherism with public pensions, implying that there is some conspiracy in the way they do their accounting. The paper ran a major business section article today headlined, “a sour surprise for public pensions: two sets of books.”
The “surprise” should hardly be a surprise to anyone familiar with public pension systems. Pensions calculate liabilities based on the expected rates of return for the assets they hold. This calculation tells governments how much they should expect to put into the fund each year on order to meet their obligations to their retirees. If they do their projections correctly (this is not an issue raised in the piece) then this should be the number that governments are most interested in.
However, the piece highlights “the second set of books.” This is market value of pension funds assets and liabilities. This is where the pensions would sit today if they wanted to cash out of the system, which is exactly the situation described in the piece. The market value would make a pension look considerably worse, since they would have to use a lower discount rate (typically the interest rate paid on either Treasury bonds or municipal bonds) to assess the liability of the funds.
The fact that the latter would show a worse situation for pensions is hardly a secret, nor is it particularly hard to determine the larger liability, at least to a close approximation. If anyone has a knowledge of the projected stream of payouts for a pension, it is a simple matter to throw this up on Excel spreadsheet and apply a different discount rate to it.
In other words, this is a great non-scandal, just like President Obama’s real birth certificate.
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