Oh, I see pretty frequent articles about public employees retiring with stupefying pensions --- and then going back to work at their old jobs and such.

Yes, and isn't it interesting we did not see such articles while people who had more lucrative choices in private industry laughed at the idea of a career in public service in the 80s and 90s, while people who chose that path were plugging along giving up working years of their lives that cannot now be recovered.

Propaganda tends to wipe out historical perspective when done successfully.

Public employees who have worked huge amounts of overtime their last year to three years before retiring in order to greatly pump up the benefits they receive.

But perhaps that should be described as abuses of current pension plans, rather than expansions of existing ones.

Yes, those are abuses, and they are indefensible. You will not typically see that scenario applying to rank and file public employees, however. Many of those articles, if you drill down, will state somewhere that the average pension is something less than $30K a year or so. Whatever the typical figure is, it doesn't lead in the headlines, or through the first several paragraphs of those articles. Why is that? If the agenda is to paint all pensioners as thieves, this is a good way to accomplish that.

The simple fact is that public employees and public employee unions have often bamboozled politicians and the public by thinking long term, getting pensions benefits that would explode in cost decades down the pike.

Oh please. Where is the evidence that politicians were "bamboozled" into agreeing to unaffordable pension plans? Why isn't it more likely that they made promises to get short-term benefits, such as votes, with a typical kick-the-can-down-the-road mindset that left this problem for the next guys? Do you think first grade teachers and cops and firefighters sat around cackling over their own actuarial and financial projections, thinking, "they can't afford to pay us this benefit! Aren't we clever to get it?"

I think your "simple fact" is unsubstantiated propaganda designed to enable taxpayers to justify dishonoring promises made to public employees who are now too far along in their careers to make a different choice.

Also, in Washington State and other states, public employee pensions can't be reduced in value once earned. They become obligations much like government bonds.

They OUGHT to be separate plans such as private employee plans, which public employees would have to fight politically to get and keep funded.

Then be honorable about it, and don't hire people under false pretenses of compensation you've no intention of paying.

REAL collective bargaining is when employee benefits can go down too, not just increase. And unions should have to spend political capital to get pension schemes funded, not just negotiate increases.

Knock yourself out with negotiations over benefits going forward. Don't steal benefits already earned. How would you like if the various clients you had over the years started clawing into your bank accounts for money back for services you rendered years ago?

In short, public employee pensions should be compared with those received by employers of private employers these days ---which are usually $0.00.

By all means, accelerate the race to the bottom for middle class workers in both private and public jobs. You've got yours. Nothing else matters.