Pensions are a way for negotiators to kick the can down the road - and often they're negotiators who by the time it becomes a problem will have taken their own pensions or golden parachutes and retired far away from the town or state in question.

It's also a lot easier to blame the people still around hoping to collect the pensions they were promised (and for which they took lower wages) than to blame others who screwed things up. I kind of feel that it's perfectly legitimate for legislatures to cut pensions as long as they also come to a retroactive agreement with the people affected to compensate them for the lowered pay that they took all those years ago, plus interest, and if it's going to be a lump sum cover any increased tax burden due to the size as well. Basically if you want to cut the pension, you have to retroactively fund the 401k or IRA that would make up for it.

Or of course they could work out a formula that attempts to cover part of the shortfall from the pensions of those who created the problem by chronically underfunding - legislators, governors, mayors, council members, superintendents, etc. for public pensions, the retired CEOs and board members and their estates for private pensions. I can't imagine that there'd be any screaming about that. It wouldn't make much difference in the amount of cuts, but it might be a deterrent to prevent similar issues in the future.

Consider Illinois, which has massive pension problems at the state and local levels. The state and towns/cities negotiated contracts that included pensions at a known level and had a pretty good idea of how much they needed to be funding in advance to cover those obligations, but instead of actually doing so they spent the money elsewhere on things more likely to get them reelected. It's like putting 1% in a 401k so you can spend the rest on parties every weekend, then screaming at retirement time that there's not enough in there to support you.

There are absolutely abuses and outliers - abuses where the senior decision makers implement policies that dramatically increase payouts, then retire to take advantage of those increases as I believe was the case in this article. Abuses like that happen in the corporate world as well, where they're often called "golden parachutes." Anyone else here remember reading about companies paying senior executives tens or hundreds of millions in compensation just to get rid of them?

There are also folks who've worked several different jobs, each of them with a pension that vests fully after 15 or 20 years, so once they actually retire they're able to collect separate full pensions from several different bodies or even occasionally from the same one - consider someone who was a police officer or fireman for 20 years, then "retired" and moved to another job in the same municipality. That person may well have a police/fire pension plus another civil service pension. I'm pretty sure Illinois and probably other places are working on reducing those with rules that limit the number of full pensions from one entity that people can get, but that won't make a huge difference.

What happens regularly is that you'll see stories like this that highlight the outliers - particularly outliers that were previously in the most senior positions - and use them as an argument for how the whole system is broken and needs to be scrapped. Expect to see those most often from the Tribune companies (multiple papers, headlined by the Chicago Tribune and LA Times) and Wall Street Journal (News Corp).