Out  of what little remains of my lingering sense of obligation to both of my readers, I promised myself I’d finish up my observations concerning the November election results before the year ended, but I didn’t promise it would be particularly interesting (though I would have to note that I share the blame for this with the voters).

As I previously noted, in attempting to do my year-end round of stories on the local election returns, I was stymied by the fact that Orthodox Pundit had already beaten me to some of the best stories and has already said a lot of

This is the second part of Rock Hackshaw's three-part column reflecting on the passing of Nelson Mandela.

If you haven’t read part one of this three-parter then I suggest you do so. These columns are being written in response to what I see as the media hypocrisy surrounding Nelson Mandela’s death: there is a context and there are specific themes.  

This is my third post on a tabulation of Census Bureau data on public employee pension plans in New York and New Jersey over the decades. The first was on the separate pension funds for teachers. The second was on the large plans that cover most state and local government pensions in the two states. This post is on the separate pension plans for New York City and New Jersey police officers and firefighters. Although they have different benefits, police officers and firefighters in the rest of New York State are covered by the same state pension system that covers most public employees, and data for police and fire is not reported to (or collected by) the Census Bureau separately.

The data show that the New York Police Pension Fund Article 2, the New York City Fire Department Article 1B Pension Fund, and the New Jersey Police and Firemen's Retirement System are deep in the hole. In the most recent year for which data is available they paid out the equivalent of 8.0% to 10.0% of their assets, but those assets ought to be sufficient to pay all of the benefits owed to current retirees, most of the benefits owed to those soon to retire, and some of the benefits owed to younger workers. And given how generous pension benefits are for New York and New Jersey’s police officers and firefighters, that means there ought to be enough money in the funds to pay monthly benefits for decades. There isn’t. And in the case of the NYC firefighter’s fund there hasn’t been for decades. The charts and discussion are here on Saying the Unsaid in New York.

In our last visit together, we began our exploration of the November election returns with a look at the most interesting local race; we now turn our attention from the undercard to the main event:

New York City and New Jersey have more than one pension plan for public employees. There are separate plans for teachers and related workers, for police officers and firefighters, and big plans for just about everyone else. My prior post in this series, which this post will assume the reader has read, was about the New York City, New York State, and New Jersey teacher pension plans, with the New York State plan covering teachers in the part of the state outside New York City. This post is about the big plans for most public workers: the New York City Employees Retirement System (NYCERS), which also covers New York City transit workers, the New York (state) Public Employees Pension and Retirement System, which also covers local government workers (including police officers and firefighters) in the rest of New York State, and the New Jersey Public Employees Retirement System.

I thought this post would be written very quickly, because the trends and situation would be the same as it was for the teachers. But when I put data from the database of long term Census Bureau data into the same charts that I used for the teacher pension plans, I found that wasn’t the case for New York City. The various retroactive pension increases and incentives over the years had less of an effect on inflation-adjusted NYCERS benefit payments than they did on benefit payments by the Teachers Retirement System of New York City. But NYCERS is nonetheless only slightly better funded than the NYC teachers pension plan, because the extent of taxpayer pension underfunding has been greater. Indeed, unlike the pension plan for NYC teachers, NYCERS never really got out of the hole after the big pension increases under former Mayor Lindsay in the late 1960s. Further discussion and a spreadsheet with a series of charts are here on “Saying the Unsaid in New York.”

It’s a little late but I wasn’t able to really dig deeply into the NYC Primary numbers until recently, so here’s some of what I found by matching the 2013 Primary voter history to the Prime New York Voter File.

A Surprisingly Large Number of Non-Prime Democrats Voted