The pension hits just keep on coming

20120627 pension worse

More bad news for Kentucky's public pension system. A recent report by Moody's lumps Kentucky in with nine other states whose public pension liabilities are at least equal to their annual revenue. From Reuters:

Ten U.S. states have public pension liabilities that are at least as big as their annual revenues, according to a Moody's Investors Service report released on Thursday that found the Illinois pension bill was equal to 241 percent of its revenues.

The rating agency took a new approach to determining the health of public retirement systems by weighing each plan's net pension liability - the difference between the projected benefit payments and the assets set aside to cover those payments - against state revenue.

Kentucky's liability was the third worst in this particular ranking coming in at 140.9% of annual state revenue. That is not a good thing.

The General Assembly needs to seriously consider solutions such as making the public pension system transparent, lowering legislator's overall retirement benefits, changing the cost-of-living adjustment formula, and rolling back 2005's HB 299 if we are ever going to climb out of this pension debt.