Josh Barro: Teacher pensions are a ticking time bomb | Washington Examiner

Josh Barro: Teacher pensions are a ticking time bomb | Washington Examiner:

What could be worse news than that public school teacher pensions across the country report an unfunded liability of over $330 billion? How about the fact that these reports understate the size of the liability by a factor of three?

Recently, the Manhattan Institute and the Foundation for Educational Choicereleased a report (which I co-authored with Stuart Buck of the University of Arkansas) that scrutinizes the financial statements of the 59 pension plans covering most teachers in the United States. We applied private sector-style standards to their estimates of future liabilities, and adjusted their asset values to fully reflect the last two years' drop in stock prices"