Watchdog.org Podcast

Breaking The Bank is Watchdog.org’s weekly look at the national public pension crisis, how it’s affecting state and city budgets and what can be done — if anything — to fix it. In this week’s episode, hosts Eric Boehm and Steve Greenhut are joined by Joe Luppino-Esposito, editor of State Budget Solutions, to discuss some common pension gimmicks used by city and state governments. State Budget Solutions has recently published a report looking at how those gimmicks hurt budgets and taxpayers. Some of those gimmicks are well-known: we just disucssed pension obligations bonds a few weeks ago on this very program.  But others are less so: like how California is using faulty assumptions (or hoping lots of police and firefighters will die in the line of duty) when it comes to figuring out how long public retirees will live.