By Elizabeth Bauer, includes “… Is it just bean-counting, to care about budgets during a pandemic? Is it too much of a stretch to say there’s a connection between the degree of destruction in a protest-riot and public pensions? Of course there’s far more to the story, but making hard choices to enable funding pension plans or kicking the can for future generations, and actively working to forestall riots or choosing to believe that insurance will cover the losses anyway — it all matters, and it’s all fundamentally a question of accepting responsibility rather than believing it can be shunted off to others or to future generations.”