BULLSHIT, moron.
Pensions were like stock but investing in the company you work for.
Like investing in America, republicans put a stop to that too.
No, there weren't.
BUT.
In 2004, Republican helped to pass a new accounting requirement that threatens to destroy public institutions, pensions, and unions.
Here is how it works. Each public institution now has to put on its financial books the total liability for its retiree health care plans. At first glance, this seems like a prudent law, but it was designed to undermine pensions by making them appear to be generating huge deficits. To understand this problem, we can look at the University of California, which has its own retirement plans.
Due to the 2004 accounting change (GASB 45), the UC system has been forced to declare on its books a multi-billion dollar retiree health care liability; however, the university is not actually spending these billions.
For instance, in 2009, it declared a $1.5 billion retiree health care liability, but it only used $240 million to cover this account. Moreover, the university has now accumulated over $14 billion in its total retiree health care liability, and so when it tries to balance its books, it shows a huge deficit.
In response to this expanding liability, the system has called to reduce benefits and increase the contributions that employees make to their own plans.
It is important to stress that the UC is not spending billions on retiree health care each year; rather, it being forced to predict how much it would need to cover all present and future retirees. However, since the huge accounting liability works to produce a fiscal deficit, the university fears that its high bond ratings will go down, and then it will have to pay much higher interest rates on its bonds, and virtually everything the university now does, is tied up with borrowing money.
