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"I'd leave too, quite frankly, but it's a very scary position for me," said Schedler, a Republican. Jindal is opposing attempts to make the bills apply only to future hires. In California, Jerry Brown faces an even-larger unfunded liability for the state's two retirement systems
-- $150 billion. Brown wants to increase the retirement age for future workers, require current and new local and state government employees to pay more, increase the years a new employee must work to qualify for retiree health benefits and place new workers into a hybrid plan that includes 401(k)-style accounts. Republicans say Brown's plan doesn't go far enough but have generally embraced his proposal. "We believe it's a good start," said Senate Minority Leader Bob Huff, a Republican. "It's certainly rare that you see us agreeing with the Democrat governor." But Democratic lawmakers who control the Legislature in California have not acted on the ideas in the more than six months since Brown offered them. Concerns have been raised that existing case law makes it difficult to change contribution rates for current employees and retirees outside of collective bargaining. Union leaders have said the proposals cut too deeply into pension benefits, despite a nonpartisan legislative analysis that found California public workers receive some of the most generous pension benefits in the U.S. Carroll Wills, a spokesman for the California Professional Firefighters, said the union supports some measures, like ending pension abuses, but feels public employees have been maligned in stories about public executives who game the system. Wills said "the notion that pension funds are an unmitigated drain on tax dollars" is misleading. Changes to state-backed retirement plans for public employees were rare before 2005, said Snell, of the National Conference of State Legislatures. But then the economic slump and the stock market downturn battered investments and funding levels of retirement systems. The average funding ration for 126 statewide retirement plans had fallen to about 77 percent by 2010, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. To pay for benefits, more and more tax dollars will have to be shifted to pension payments, threatening to crowd out spending on health care, education and road repairs. The underfunding isn't the workers' fault. Retirees are living longer, the systems assumed optimistic investment returns but faced losses instead and politicians raised benefits or added workers to systems over the decades without adding new money to cover the costs. "We made a bunch of promises we couldn't keep. We're where we are because all of us like to make people feel good and promise them things like a 28-year retirement, which sounded great at the time, but we didn't pay for it," said South Carolina Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a Democrat who served on a panel that studied that state's retirement benefits. But public employees, in many instances, don't have the Social Security safety net. They don't pay into that government system and so they can't get Social Security benefits when they get older. That's why they think it's unfair for states to shrink their pensions. "The state made a commitment," Jerry Pecora, a 25-year Louisiana state employee, recently urged lawmakers. "Don't penalize and punish the people that are working hard to try to provide, to stay off all the welfare, to stay off all the social stuff." For his part, Carpenter is trying to sort out what the changes may mean for his financial future. The Louisiana Workforce Commission accountant had planned to put his three children through college before retiring at around age 59 with full benefits, about three-fourths of his salary. Now he faces the possibility of having to wait until he turns 64 to reach that level of pension benefits. "You're paying more to wait longer for less benefits," he said. "One thing is bad enough, but when you combine it with insurance going up, pay staying the same, I'm considering looking at going back to the private sector."
[Associated
Press;
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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