Today, Cato released a report on employee compensation in state and local governments. As states struggle to balance their budgets in coming months, they should look to find savings in employee compensation, which represents half of all state and local spending.

The particular issue of excessive state pensions is being probed by newspapers across the nation. Over at Reason, Nick Gillespie discusses the problem in his home state of Ohio. That state’s newspapers teamed up to pen a series of articles on government pensions, which are representative of the growing pension problems in many states.

There has been a parallel series of articles across the nation on “pay-to-play” state pension scandals. These scandals involve Wall Street firms bribing public officials to get a slice of the government’s financial business. There is pay-to-play corruption in California and pay-to-play corruption in New York and many other places.

The solution to both of these problems is the same: moving the nation’s 20 million state and local workers from defined-benefit to defined-contribution pension plans. That way, governments wouldn’t have to hold giant pools of pension investments, the benefit structure of government workers would be more transparent, and policymakers could more easily cut compensation to balance state budgets.

State Budgets and Employee Compensation is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

If only.

Just as the Obama administration takes over another once-great American company, Sweden is busy privatizing. As the Christian Science Monitor reported recently:

Last week, the country’s center-right government began selling off state-owned pharmacies, one of the country’s few remaining nationalized companies, as part of an ambitious program of liberal economic reforms started in 2006. In the same week, a study by the Swedish Unemployment Insurance Board revealed that almost half of the country’s jobless lacked full unemployment benefits. Many opted out of the state scheme when the cost of membership was raised last year; others were ineligible.

State pensions, schools, healthcare, public transport, and post offices have been fully or partly privatized over the last decade, making Sweden one of the most free market orientated economies in the world, analysts say.

Please, President Obama, send Larry Summers to Sweden to get some new ideas for economic reform.

Is Obama Making America like Sweden? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog