I’ve received quite a range of Facebook reactions to my December 2 post on the role of Oregon’s public employee unions in creating the PERS mess.

I’ll have another follow-up post soon, but I want to refer you to the best explanation I’ve seen about how we got here with PERS. It’s a short video (less than five minutes) produced by The Oregonian about three years ago. It a must-watch for anyone interested in PERS, especially the part starting at about 2 ½ minutes in. That explains the piece of PERS history I was talking about in my December 2 post, where the public employee unions, in charge of PERS, lit a Saturn V rocket under the future benefit obligations of the system, producing not only Mike Bellotti-sized pensions (currently almost $600,000 per year), but also very high pensions for many rank and file employees, some of whom are receiving an amount far in excess of what they made working.

That rocket was defused some in 1996, when Oregon created PERS’s Tier Two and started hiring all new employees under it. But it wasn’t until 2000 that Tier One benefits were stopped from growing beyond the guaranteed rate of return (then 8%). By then the damage was done, (remember the tech stock market bubble?), and a series of Oregon Supreme Court decisions generally held that the legislature was powerless to do much about it.

State workers who entered the system after the creation of Tier Two in 1996 are entitled to pensions that are far less than Tier One employees. Benefits owed to them are not the problem. Rather, it’s the remaining active Tier One workers (steadily dwindling in number) and retirees. That’s why an amount equal almost to the entire PERS unfunded liability (currently nearly $30 billion) is owed to retirees.

More to come in future posts.