Re "Pension-cutting plans on ballot promise savings but don't deliver" (Viewpoints, Jan. 31): California State University accounting professor Steven Filling should take refresher courses. He says pension reform would dramatically increase costs by as much as $1 billion a year because reforms will substantially reduce cash flow into current plans.
What?
He relied on analyses by the same experts who in 1999 said SB 400, which retroactively increased pension benefits and lowered retirement ages for public workers, would not cost anything.
He also mentioned our study which determined salaries for the highest-skilled public workers--the top 10 percent--are paid less per hour than their counterparts in the private sector.
But he doesn't mention more than 90 percent of public workers are paid more and that all California's public workers' retirement benefits are substantially higher than in the private sector. Filling will receive a public pension so he has an obvious conflict of interest. Accounting professors from private universities likely have a different opinion.
-- Marcia Fritz, president, California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, Orangevale
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