“There is a solution.” So proclaims Democrat Alex Bergstein in a recent op-ed in this paper and in her glossy campaign literature.
State Senate candidate Bergstein’s Eureka-like announcement concerns the state’s severely underfunded public employee pension funds, a problem which many people view as almost intractable.
“The solution” is a “shared risk model,” which Bergstein says the Province of New Brunswick in Canada “moved to” in 2012 and “reduced its liabilities by 30 percent.”
“There are no easy undiscovered instant solutions to the pension problem,” responds five-term Senate incumbent, Republican Scott Frantz. “Besides, the problem is cost, not risk. The state already has unaffordable pension costs. There’s no risk about it.”
Red Jahncke is a nationally recognized columnist, who writes about politics and policy. His columns appear in numerous national publications, such as The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, USA Today, The Hill, Issues & Insights and National Review as well as many Connecticut newspapers.
