Public sector pensions are not discretionary government spending, which can be reduced to maintain affordability. They are deferred pay earned as part of a legally binding contract of employment, and their true cost should be properly measured.

All major EPA decisions are contentious, but the current flurry of regulatory initiatives raises unusually serious issues of costs and benefits, feasibility, methodology, and agency discretion.

If Washington pension plans were judged by the standards that private-sector pensions are required to follow, they would face unfunded liabilities exceeding $50 billion. The costs of truly fully funding public-employee pensions could swamp the state budget, and at more than $20,000 per household, taxpayers too.

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is not the unmitigated blessing Fannie and Freddie loyalists imply. It is a big reason U.S. mortgage markets are in such bad shape.

Several studies have shown that public-sector workers receive higher compensation than their counterparts in the private sector. Although, federal contractors have some of the advantages of private sector workers, in that poor performers can be dismissed and the composition of the contractor workforce altered, it is possible that they are overcompensated just as federal employees are right now.

The massive underfunded pension funds of states and municipalities and the precarious status of the budgets of these entities have received wide publicity recently.

A January 2012 report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows that federal government employees receive substantially higher compensation than similarly skilled workers in the private sector. The report’s methodology and conclusions are broadly similar to previous studies from both The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.

An analysis of why current public sector pension accounting standards understate liabilities and encourage excessive risk-taking