I recently read an article about San Francisco Pensions here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/02/07/BAD91HJ22F.DTL&tsp=1

Is my buddy just wrong with any of his explanation below?

Yeah, the pension system is broken in a lot of first world countries. Thats a lot of how government works, though; when the economy is up there is less crime from a lower unemployment rates, and more income by the state. But people are alwa…ys screaming about the problem of the moment, which when the dot com thing happened, was education. So, money gets removed from the system when we have it. How, then, do you get employees if you are only offering 62k a year while the entire time they have a higher risk and more responsibility with the job? Pension is a simple solution. Just offer money later. A police officer can retire right now at 20 years with 65% pension.
A friend of mine(who you can ask about later, I just don’t want the name public) was a community college teacher. His last 2 semesters he signed up to teach something like 20 online classes. It made it look like his last year that he made 350k or something like that. It allowed him to retire on 180 or 150k. Something like that.
The pension system is broken, but it allows for referred debt. But no one seems to complain about it while we are outside of a debt crisis, so the problem will manifest in one way or another.
It will be one of two problems:
1) We need more police, fire persons, and teachers while we are in a boom. Which means the government officials will have to get creative with how to pay the government officials adequately or
2) We are at a debt crunch where we need to save money and we see that these government bodies are getting as much money as they are.
Here are a couple of interesting figures for you. 52% of the GDP in California is from government bodies. So, saying that government officials make a lot of money I think is redundant. The question is HOW are they making that money. In this case its pensions, but what about overtime? What about variable pay rates? What about bonuses? What about hefty christmas gifts? There are a lot of outlets for it, it just takes a creative official in a management position.
Another interesting figure was that in 2009 China declared that it has 1.3 billion dollars embezzled. I mean, that is like .2% of there GDP. Which may sound small in comparison, but think about it in terms of that being the embezzled money that was FOUND.
So, what I am saying with that is think about if WE had a problem with embezzlement like that.
Generally speaking I think that the US manages funds very well considering that they are led by popular vote.