Public Pensions After Detroit and the New York Times

Just once in my life I would like to see an Editorial Board come out on an issue of the day with but one line:

This is vitally important but, unfortunately, we have no one among us with enough pertinent experience to opine intelligently on this matter.

It would have been preferable  to see that in today’s New York Times instead of the inanities spouted regarding the lessons to be learned from the Detroit Pension debacle:

“One is that state and local governments need to do a much better job managing retirement funds. The other is that they should not pre-emptively reduce hard-earned benefits at the first sign of trouble.”

Dangerously wrong in a myriad of ways:

• If anything investment returns for public plans, boosted by those imaginary figures attached to alternative investments, have been the good news.
• If not pre-emptively reduced then is the plan to wait until all the money is gone, including the participants’ own contributions, before considering benefit reductions?
• Why not then reduce the benefits that haven’t been ‘hard-earned’, like those for elected and appointed officials who leech off the system?
• It wouldn’t be the ‘first sign of trouble’ if actuaries were doing the job that the public assumes they are doing.

Then there are these lines that appear within three paragraphs of each other:

“Several state and local pension systems around the country are under serious stress.”

“Most government retirement systems are in much better shape than critics suggest.”

So which is it or does that depend on which ill-considered prejudice is being justified at the moment?