Public employee pension systems have long been a source of problems. State government politicians are continually tempted to underfund pension plans in favor of using that money for something with an immediate payoff. Those same politicians also tend to grant increased pension benefits to state employees because it is a simple vote-buying scheme with no immediate budgetary cost. However, a sign of how bad the morass of public pension funds has become is that most of them have become more underfunded in the past five years. If public pensions get more underfunded in years with positive stock market gains, what hope is there for their survival?
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