From NCPA:
When the public pay debate began to simmer two years ago, Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Jason Richwine, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, were among the few analysts to show that many public employees — federal, state and local, including public school teachers — are paid more than what their skills would merit in the private economy. Their core insight was that public-sector pensions are several times more generous than typical private-sector plans, but this generosity is obscured by accounting assumptions that allow governments to contribute far less to pension plans than private employers must.
Public-employee unions and left-leaning think tanks dismissed Biggs’ and Richwine’s analyses, but now several government agencies have weighed in with analyses that strongly support their original insight.
