Excerpt: (The Washington Post; free registration required) reports today ('Steep Losses Pose Crisis for Pensions') on the sorry state of funding in state and local employee pensions, focusing on the impact of recent poor stock returns. While a poor investment climate certainly hasn't helped, it's not the biggest reason public employee funds are in bad shape. A bigger reason the plans are underfund is that, in effect, we told them they can be. State and local pension plans use different and far less demanding accounting rules than do corporate pensions, even though public employee benefits are guaranteed by law while corporate pension benefits are not. The key issue is how to 'discount' future benefit obligations to the present, which tells us how much plans must have on hand today to fund their future liabilities. A high discount rate lowers the present value of a future obligation, while a low discount rate implies a higher present value.