Footing the bill for misbehavior

From the NY Post:

GARDEN STATE ROBBERY

Say this for New York’s governors and Legislatures: For all the fiscal shenanigans they’ve perpetrated since time immemorial, they’ve always been smart enough to keep their greedy little hands off of the state’s pension fund.

Not so the powers that be in New Jersey – who decided about a decade ago that the future nest-egg of the Garden State’s public employees would better serve as Trenton’s private piggy bank.

Who ever thought that Albany would ever be held up as a model of fiscal rectitude?

New Jersey may not be the only state with a pension-funding mess, but what the folks across the Hudson pulled off over the past decade is positively breathtaking in its audacity.

And because the state Constitution forbids reducing earned pension benefits, Garden Staters probably can forget about significant tax relief for a long time to come.

The state finds itself with a long-term $25 billion shortage in its pension fund for retired teachers, police, firefighters and government workers – brought about largely because governors and legislators stopped putting money into the fund, even as they were improperly raiding it to pay other, capital, expenses.

Worse still, the state lied about how much it was contributing into the fund: Two years ago, Jersey claimed it had put $551 million into the pension fund.

The true figure: zero.

That’s right – absolutely nothing.

And that’s not the only time the state simply “forgot” to pay into the fund.