Dan Borenstein's most recent column greatly oversimplifies and needlessly discounts the real impact that Governor Brown's pension reform has had since it took effect in January 2013.

By Dave Low
 

Backers of an effort to slash the retirement of public servants got a stiff dose of reality this month when leaders of the state's top public investment funds raised red flags about the plan that could be headed for the 2016 ballot.

They said the latest proposal on public pensions from former San Diego Councilman Carl DeMaio and former San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed would undermine decades of labor law and collective bargaining precedent and threaten retirement security for tens of thousands of working families.

by Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times

Along with taxation and immigration, one political issue that never seems to go away is the cost of public employees, especially their pensions.

Public retirement plans are consistently blamed for local and state budget woes. Any time a community runs into fiscal trouble, its workers are among the first to be demonized, and often bear the brunt of the remedies. After all, pension obligations are typically among the largest liabilities any government entity must bear, so why not hack away?

We strongly disagree with the Attorney General's elimination of the specific mention of teachers, nurses, police and firefighters in the title and summary. They are the bulk of the public servants whose retirement security and death and disability benefits would be abolished by this heavy-handed measure. The inclusion of these professions in a previous version of this measure had already passed legal muster, even after multiple appeals by Chuck Reed.