It’s beginning to look a lot like budget season.

The AFL-CIO went on the air today with a new ad blasting Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Albany lawmakers for their efforts to add a sixth tier to the pension system, and blaming the effort on Wall Street fat cats who, the ad states, propelled Mr. Cuomo into office.

“They crashed our economy. We bailed them out. Now Wall Street, big banks and corporate CEO’s have teamed up with some politicians in Albany to slash pensions of working New Yorkers by 40 percent,” the narrator intones.

The ad conflates a bit two separate problems with the state’s pension system–on the one side, the pension fund is suffering due to the crash of the economy, but it is not quite accurate to say that because of that Mr. Cuomo and others who are pushing for reform are only doing so because of the crash. In fact, they often point out that the health of the pension fund isn’t so much a short-term as it is a long-term problem. Read More