By Girard Miller, includes “The way state and local governments keep their books is uniquely different from the way the private sector operates. Public-sector organizations are expected to be ‘perpetuities’ — to never go out of business — and to provide for a common good. … 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.”