The future of New York, City and State, has been severely diminished by the self dealing of the past, including the recent past. But we can at least be thankful that Bloomberg, Paterson, Silver, Skelos and Quinn are not proposing a stunt like this. New Jersey's pension funds have only half the money needed to pay benefits, even given an assumed rate of return they'll never get, and unlike in New York it was taxpayers unwilling to pay taxes rather than public employees seeking pension sweeteners that get the lion's share of the blame. So what is being proposed in the Garden State? Keeping taxes down by taking (another) "holiday" from required pension contributions!
Now that most of the evildoers have been re-elected over on our side the Hudson, we can only hope they'll decide they've done enough damage and not try anything like this. At some point you can't sell the future more than once, because people will get wise enough not to buy. Think municipal bonds are a nice safe investment? We'll see. If only people understood that decisions, non-decisions and deals like this have a massive impact on their future well being. Perhaps they aren’t worried because they believe that in the end they can just refuse to pay, like all the other unsupportable debts in the United States. Perhaps they are right.