Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Thursday, June 4, 2009

Police Pensions and the G-20

By Fester:

I wonder if the G-20 summit and its attendant ring of security will be the light breeze that destroys the fragment of imagination that is the Pittsburgh Police pension system?  Right now, the police pension is massively underfunded, Chris Briem estimates it might be at 20% to 22% of its obligations.  There is a chance the G-20 summit will significantly add to obligations without a concurrent increase in pension assets.

Police pensions for officers in or near the retirement zone are defined benefit pensions.  Officers get a benefit defined by a formula (for as long as the money lasts).  The formula is some variant of either years of service times a base level, or in the case of Pittsburgh, a percentage of either the best couple of years of inflation adjusted earnings OR a percentage of the average earnings over the last couple of years of active service.  I have not recently looked at the contract so I forget what the percentage is applied to.  In either case, the incentive is for an officer nearing retirement to rack up as many overtime hours as possible.  This increases the base upon which the multiplier is applied against.

The G-20 summit will be an all-hands security operation for local law enforcement.  That security requirement will extend on either side of the summit, into the weekend and from the work-week, as leaders begin to fly into town earlier in the week, and protests continue through the weekend.  The protest groups in the city are starting to organize for a sustained week of activity. 

It is plausible that plenty of senior cops who are nearing retirement age and who are already in their 'inflation' window will be working an unexpected 100 hour or 120 hour week.  The city and other local government units will be reimbursed for security expenses by the federal government.  However the current city reimbursement rate for police is insufficient to cover expected pension obligations as it is.  The combination of a significant increase in overtime for the entire near-retirement cohort as well as insufficient incoming assets to cover those obligations could push the funding ratio of the police pension fund into the teens.   



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