Jackson Jambalaya

Haley Barbour has done a good job of holding off tax increases but he's failed miserably at holding the line on deferred tax increases.

A said state of affairs Kingfish. Looks like the Legislature is following the same transformational long term debt laden strategy that has brought Jackson to the precipice of fiscal ruin.

Anyone heard from Tater Reeves about this recipe for disaster?

Is it because I use Internet Explorer that all the "s's" in that post have been changed to "f's"? Not that I am not thoroughly tickled by saying "Maffachufettf" out loud ....

I think this is the "Ben Franklin" font where all "Ss" look like "Fs" ;-)


PS I use IE at work and Firefox at home. I'm at work and this is the first time I've seen this font display.

Yeah, I thought the "f"/"s" thing was an inside joke that I wasn't in on.

Tate isn't responsible for setting contribution rates and he isn't responsible for our state having a defined benfit plan instead of moving toward a defined contribution plan. He also doesn't set the eligibility requirements (i.e. age of retirement). I wrote about this a few weeks ago in the Madison County Journal. I'll see if I can't post a link in a moment. -Russ Latino

But he sure as hell can use the Treasurer's bully pulpit to come out warning about the dangers of incremental LT debt vis-a-vis this session's $400+ million bond bill on top of last year's mammoth $800+ million taxpayer screw job. He could have efforted to rally the public against more debt spending.

Where's Tater?

I am not Tate's spokesperson. Was addressing whether he could reform PERS from his office. The danger of the system was set into play long before Tate took office. Even in times of plenty, before the market crash, PERS had an unfunded liability of 7.7 billion, which for a state with the GDP of Mississippi is huge.

I will also say that I have heard him speak publicly against the last bond bill and about the need to reform PERS, though he has never publicly discussed changing the system from a defined benefit plan.

One of the things that is not being reported about our state spending is that we have 1.2 billion in bonds that have been authorized, but not issued. In other words, not yet on the books but guaranteed to be incurred. That puts our 4.5 billion in debt up to 5.7 billion. Add another 400 million plus from this year's bond bill and we eclipse the 6 billion mark. Mississippi should implement TABOR and we should count our bond issues in the calculation. Just my two cents. -Russ

See the Wall Street Journal article at Moody's State Debt Picture Folds In Pension Obligations

Article from a few weeks ago in Madison County Journal addressing state debt and retirement system:
http://onlinemadison.com/main.asp?SectionID=3&SubSectionID=3&ArticleID=23445

I wonder how much is PERS and how much is state bonds. It seems like the state has issued a lot of bonds the last 8 years, while PERS contributions have increased.

I understand fiscally how the two are not that different, but politically they are very different.

http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/publius-forum/2011/04/top-worst-state-budgets-unions-have-put-every-states-budget-in-the-hole.html

something fishy. we appear to have debt load v. unfunded debt load.

Would someone please investigate PERS? From what little I'm given, it appears investments were made that were not appropriate nor in the investment policy, under guise of "bonds" which were alternative crap.