In New York City, the fox looks after the chickens

"State law requires that all new legislation be evaluated to determine its financial impact. For a time, these evaluations were performed for the state assembly by a professional actuary named Jonathan Schwartz. Last year, Schwartz found that a piece of bipartisan legislation allowing city workers to retire early with full pension benefits would impose no new costs. His declaration was greeted with disbelief. Reporters at the New York Times got on the case, and discovered that Schwartz did not work for the Assembly, as was generally believed, but rather for District Council 37 of the Service Employees Union.

Confronted by a reporter, Schwartz replied candidly that he regularly skewed his evaluations to satisfy his union employers. He described his supposedly actuarial evaluations as "a step above voodoo." When Schwartz was told that the legislators sponsoring the early-retirement bill were unaware of his affiliations, he replied, "The Legislature knows full well I'm being paid by the unions. If they choose not to disclose that, that's on them, not me." When asked which unions he had worked for, he replied, "How many unions are there?" His client list included the teachers, firefighters, detectives, correction officers, and bridge and tunnel officers. New York State has the highest per-employee pension costs in the country for a reason.

Jonathan Schwartz is now gone, but, with Wall Street in shambles and 146,000 private-sector jobs having been lost in the city since last August, the public-sector unions still surge ahead."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/05/31/
new_york_on_the_precipice_96745.html