The Governments Division has released data on state and local government pension plans for FY 2012, and I have downloaded and compiled it for that year and a decade and two decades earlier. The data shows the arrival of a crisis in public employee pensions, with soaring public employee retirement costs causing or threatening municipal bankruptcy and leading to tax increases, service cuts, and reductions in benefits for future (and in some cases current and past) government employees. All this has shown up in the data between FY 2002 and FY 2012, although most of the decisions that led to the crisis were made in the previous decade.
The data shows that the people of New York City are among those who have been made worst off as a result of the rising cost of public employee pensions. There is more pension drama elsewhere simply because those living there are unwilling to live with the high tax burden and low public service levels (including 50 years of lousy schools) that have been imposed on New Yorkers since the 1970s. Those imposing that burden in New York benefit from low public participation in state and local government, something our state politicians go to great lengths to encourage. To show how and to what extent people are being affected, I have produced a spreadsheet that has tables with data for New York City and the Rest of New York State, and state and local government combined in all the other states and the U.S. as a whole. That spreadsheet, a series of charts, and commentary may be found on “Saying the Unsaid in New York.”