The City of Baltimore, heading for bankruptcy, is trying to retroactively reduce the pensions of police and firefighters with 15 or fewer years on the job. Their unions have fought back with a lawsuit that claims "officials 'knowingly underfunded' their pension plan over the past decade."
"Knowingly." Now there is a word that could be used more often as we head for an institutional collapse. After all, public employee unions knowingly lied about the future consequences of all the retroactive pension enhancements they got in backroom deals with their pols over the past 15 years. They often approved underfunding the pensions as part of the same deals. Those pols also knowingly ran up debts that would obviously lead to a combination of massive tax cuts and service cuts in the future. They knowingly ran up off the books debts by not setting aside any money for the retire health care benefits they had promised, and made those promises unlimited, since they themselves would benefit. And they knowingly failed to reinvest in the public infrastucture enough to keep it from declining, while borrowing a lot for it by overpaying for the work that was done.
Generation Greed knew what it was doing.