WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: California Sounds Retreat In War On Arithmetic.

The trouble with math, of course, is that it is so implacable. You can tell it anything you want; the numbers don’t change. If you don’t put enough money away, and it doesn’t grow as fast as you tell yourself it will grow, you won’t have enough money when the time comes to write the checks.

That is where California is today.

Despite the best efforts of public unions and government planners to deny the hard truth, in some combination, payouts will need to drop and other contributions will need to rise to keep the funds from running out of dough.

Calpers, the most important California retirement fund and one of the largest pension funds in the country, is responding to the crisis with a partial recognition of reality. For the first time in nearly a decade, it is lowering its estimates for return on investments to 7.5 percent.

So they’ve gone from wildly unrealistic to merely extremely unrealistic. Well, I suppose it’s progress.