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Governments, which often offer their workers DB pensions, have been far slower than the corporate sector in attempting to reduce the cost. In large part this is because of the way they account for pensions. In America they are allowed to assume a return of 7.5-8% on their investments, making deficits look a lot smaller. But generous accounting assumptions do not make the problem go away. The Centre for Retirement Research (CRR) at Boston College has looked at around 4,000 American state and local-government pension plans. Even using the accounting standards permitted, the plans were on average 72% funded at the end of 2015. On a more conservative 4% discount rate, this drops to 45%. On the former basis, the collective deficit is $1.2 trillion; on the latter $4.1 trillion.

Insolvency: America’s states, counties, cities and municipalities are in deep trouble, owing literally trillions in public employee pensions that they can’t pay off. Nowhere is that more apparent than in California, the nation’s poster boy for fiscal irresponsibility.

It’s a myth that public employees trade lower pay for pensions. Exploding salaries are driving pension costs upward. My book, “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of States,” compared salaries for state jobs.  In 2014, Texas prison guards earned an average of $38,775; in California, $83,877. For police, Texas averaged $60,573; California $96,131. Texas judges averaged $158,500, while California judges averaged $212,040. California employees came off as a Gilded Age aristocracy compared with their public service peers.

Altogether, the raises are expected to cost about $99.4 million a year, according to the state Finance Department.

The retiring forecaster for California’s largest public employee pension fund offered some final advice on Tuesday: State and local governments should be required to pay more into the system as soon as next year.

“I think voters are starting to say, `Wait a minute. We keep raising taxes – where’s it going?’” Nation said. “Well, to a great extent, it’s going to public employee compensation and to pensions, specifically. And I think at some point, voters are going to say, `Not anymore.’”

It was a deal that wasn’t supposed to cost taxpayers an extra dime. Now the state’s annual tab is in the billions, and the cost keeps climbing.

It turns out that Calpers, which managed the little pension plan, keeps two sets of books: the officially stated numbers, and another set that reflects the “market value” of the pensions that people have earned. The second number is not publicly disclosed. And it typically paints a much more troubling picture, according to people who follow the money.

His signature followed narrow passage in the Legislature and intense lobbying by farmworkers. Assembly Bill 1066 will raise overtime wages for agricultural workers incrementally over four years, ultimately matching other industries by requiring time-and-a-half pay for more than eight hours in a day or 40 hours in a week.

Although the next increase in the California minimum wage is still six months away, a number of local minimum wage hikes are set to take effect on July 1, 2016.

An effort to cap the salaries of hospital executives may be blocked from California’s Nov. 8 ballot, after a Sacramento judge wrote Thursday that its labor union backers broke a political peace treaty with hospitals.

The healthcare workers union that successfully placed a minimum wage increase on the November statewide ballot formally withdrew the proposal Thursday, two months after Gov. Jerry Brown signed a similar plan into law .

It’s simple arithmetic, writes Mark Warshawsky of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, author of the study. Paying for expensive health insurance squeezes what’s left for wage and salary raises. Economic inequality increases, because health insurance typically represents a larger share of total compensation for lower-paid than higher-paid workers. Their wages are squeezed the most.

Cities that provide generous health care and other perks to their employee — sometimes nearly twice the amount of base salaries and largely unknown to taxpayers — were slapped Tuesday in an analysis released by the nonprofit group Transparent California.

The budget package negotiated by Brown and the Democrat-controlled Legislature expects $255 million in lost income from tax returns that include claims with the state’s version of the earned-income tax credit, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. That is down a third from the $380 million budgeted for the current year and what Brown proposed in January for 2016-17.