MORE ON THOSE UNDERFUNDED / OVERGENEROUS PUBLIC PENSIONS: Rhode Island Is Broke. “In Rhode Island, the citizenry is being asked to spend increasing percentages of its income and assets not for the general welfare, but for the welfare of a relatively small percentage of the population who have state and municipal pensions. It’s often joked that General Motors is a pension plan which makes automobiles. Rhode Island is in worse shape. Rhode Island is becoming a public sector pension plan which doesn’t make anything.”

Related: Chicago: 2 teachers union lobbyists teach for a day to qualify for hefty pensions. “Two lobbyists with no prior teaching experience were allowed to count their years as union employees toward a state teacher pension once they served a single day of subbing in 2007, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation has found. . . . Over the course of their lifetimes, both men stand to receive more than a million dollars each from a state pension fund that has less than half of the assets it needs to cover promises made to tens of thousands of public school teachers. With billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities, the Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System, which serves public school teachers outside of Chicago, is one of several pension plans that are in debt as state government reels in a fiscal crisis.”