By Girard Miller, includes “Some government employers are exploiting the peculiar rules of public finance to transfer public assets or cash from clever deals to their pension funds. But there’s risk to taxpayers when it’s magic beans and shell games. … The alchemists of old never did figure out how to turn lead into gold, but that doesn’t prevent the pension-finance wizards from coming up with clever new tactics to try to do much the same thing, and taxpayers have good reasons to be wary.”