Democrats have a reputation for being supported by public sector unions. And given unions’ love of conventional pensions, voters may think that Democratic lawmakers would work hard to protect public sector pensions. Michigan’s Democratic majority legislators haven’t, however. Their term ended with government workers and taxpayers being more exposed to increased pension risk.

It should be difficult for the state to get into financial trouble. The state constitution requires a balanced budget. Voters have to approve state debts. And pensions are supposed to be prefunded — when employees earn their retirement payments, employers are supposed to cover the costs by putting money into the pension fund to pay for them. This keeps the costs of current government services from being deferred to future taxpayers.

Yet the requirement to prefund pensions hasn’t worked. The members of the government-managed pension systems are the state’s largest creditors. The state owes pensioners $36 billion more than has been saved. That’s more than the $28 billion owed to the state’s bondholders.

Lawmakers didn’t ask the people in the pension system to lend them money. But they saved less than what pensioners earned and now owe them billions. That’s unfortunate and inappropriate. It’s unfair to current workers and retirees to have made them creditors by underfunding their pensions.

Lawmakers didn’t ask taxpayers whether they should owe pensioners, either. They instead mismanaged pension systems, spending more money now and deferring pension expenses to future taxpayers.

Current legislators can get credit for increased spending while burdening future legislators with the responsibility of making the hard budgetary cuts necessary to pay down pension debts. They note that pensions are complicated and markets are volatile — sometimes they’re up and sometimes they’re down — and hope it’ll all even out. Any current debts, they reason, are just temporary and can be ignored.

But that’s not been Michigan’s experience. The state’s largest government-managed pension system, which covers school districts and community colleges, has been underfunded in 48 out of the past 49 years. That’s two generations of underfunded pensions. Time has not improved the pension system.

It ought to be more difficult to ignore the underfunding risk when pensioners are the state’s largest creditors. But lawmakers increased a lot of pension risk in 2025.

Lawmakers had a rule that taxpayer contributions to pension debts wouldn’t go down until debts were paid. They scrapped that rule and moved $670 million slated to pay down school system pension debts to spend on other priorities.

Michigan’s Democratic majorities also increased pension underfunding risk in other ways. They moved to let corrections officers and other groups of workers into the underfunded state police retirement system. It’s expensive, too. When the state pays a trooper, it has to contribute an equal amount to the pension system. Letting more people earn pension benefits in an already underfunded system, as legislators did last year, increases the chances that its debts increase.

Lawmakers shouldn’t have pension debts in the first place. It’s unfair to government workers and it’s bad for taxpayers. It’s been a bad thing that Democrats dismissed the problems and risk and left the state worse off.

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