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Comment by aston | Hacker News Reader

Should lawmakers resist? There's no lack of housing and infrastructure projects worth spending on, state-wide.

I'd say there is a huge lack of housing projects, since building housing is mostly illegal.

Changing that would be very important, but it's a political will issue, not a money issue. SB50 would be a decent first reform.

Will it matter?

How much of it will actually be spent on stuff? How much of it will be spent in court fighting people over nothing in order to do things?

Lawmakers should resist treating this unusual surge of IPO tax revenue as an ongoing thing. It is an unusual occurrence that is unlikely to be repeated every year, or even every decade.

$180 billion in unfunded CalPERS liabilities, too...

I reckon I'll need a couple million to retire in the next several decades. As I'm still pretty young I have a personal pension liability of a couple million dollars.

My point here, what's the practical impact of this number? It's a scary number that's thrown out a lot, but is this number going to break the budget, or will pension spending as a fraction of the total budget be fairly stable?

I don't think anyone really knows. A lot of it depends on the stock market - if it keeps going up, things will probably be fine. But if there's a big downturn it could wipe out a lot of money in the fund. At that point you could be looking at benefit cuts and/or tax increases.

In Los Angeles, the percentage of the city budget going toward funding of pensions is about 20%. Fifteen years ago, it was around 5%. Will it keep rising? What other spending is crowded out? etc...

The CalPERS money is invested. In recessions, the pension fund shrinks and tax revenues shrink at the same time. The fraction of government spending needed to cover pensions increases as a result.

You forgot to mention that Calpers also assumed an 8% annualized return for their funding purposes. Slightly optimistic.

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