By Bob Christie, includes “Advocates of using public money for private education are pushing a wide-ranging new school voucher program that would vastly expand Arizona’s current system just two years after state voters overwhelmingly rejected a universal voucher system. ”

Tucson, Arizona, plans to leverage low interest rates in a bull market to turn about half of its unfunded public safety pension fund obligations into bond obligations. 

Much of the dust has settled from the 2020 election, but in Arizona one legal battle is just beginning. It’s a fight over the largest tax increase in the state’s history, and it’s a cautionary tale for the rest of the country—or at least for those who care about protecting their states from an onslaught of job-killing progressive policies.

Four years after the Arizona Public Safety Retirement System (PSPRS) adopted major stakeholder-driven reforms to stem a precipitous increase in unfunded pension liabilities resulting from faulty plan design, the system now appears to be on a sustainable financial trajectory, according to a new stress test analysis prepared by the Pension Integrity Project at Reason Foundation.

The 2020 Financial State of the States report surveys the fiscal health of the 50 states prior to the coronavirus pandemic. This data is released today by Truth in Accounting (TIA), a think tank that analyzes government financial reporting.

How large could the shortfall in state government general revenues be, amidst the coronavirus and related crises? 

Currently, some states and cities, most of which have gone on for years spending every dollar they could get their hands on, are now asking the Feds ( I.E taxpayers ) to bail them out.

Includes "Pension debt is similar to credit card debt, not a mortgage, because it is debt accumulated to cover costs that have already been incurred. Evidently Phoenix has a plan to pay the pension debt off over the next 22 years, but this does not negate the fact that this debt exists today. To explain this concept on a personal level, someone who plans to pay off a credit card balance over time by paying the minimum payments still has outstanding credit card debt now." 

Crushing pension debt has left some Arizona cities on the brink of bankruptcy but it's nice to see that hasn’t cramped the style of those geniuses who run the retirement plan.

“Arizona’s pension plans have taken on a lot of risk, and the reward has been major losses and rising costs. That’s not fiscally or morally sustainable, and it’s likely to worsen unless the Legislature gets serious about additional reforms that improve pension funding, set reasonable limits on actuarial assumptions and create more effective oversight structures.”

A taxpayer watchdog group and a Phoenix attorney who specializes in government settlements are questioning the legality of $120,000 in retroactive bonus payments a state pension fund administrator gave to three executives.

Reposting of our recent Patch article. 

“… In 2018, the 50-state average student debt per capita was $5,438.04, which placed Delaware above average and Arizona below average for student debt. Hypothetically, if every U.S. citizen was willing to pay $5,438.04, we could erase all student debt in the U.S. Unfortunately, money doesn't grow on trees, so it looks like you're on your own for this one.” 

This measure is a multi-faceted attack on pension debt.

The Responsible Budgets initiative would require that new spending growth be limited to the increase of population plus inflation and that every dollar above that must be used to pay down the city’s unfunded pension obligations that now exceed $4.5 billion.

Phoenix is facing a huge pension crisis and drastic measures are being considered to deal with it. One lawmaker wants the city to stop spending any money until it gets its pension debt under control.

Not that it ever really did, but Illinois no longer has any excuse for not dealing with its pension crisis, given how Arizona has reformed its system. Arizona's state constitutional pension protection clause was identical to Illinois' in promising that "benefits shall not be diminished or impaired." 

Everyone with a retirement account should keep an eye on 70½. That's the quirky age when investors typically must start pulling money out of Individual Retirement Accounts and workplace 401(k)-style plans – or face the consequences.

Teachers in Arizona and Colorado were seeing red this week, and they have a right to be mad. Average teacher salaries in both states have declined significantly, in real terms, over the last two decades.

Driverless cars could become a regular feature of the roads as early as April – at least in California, which has decided to allow fully autonomous vehicles to be tested on the roads (none of those pesky humans who have been present in test drives so far).