How is a worker supposed to know if the benefits are properly funded? Even if they can know, some of these used to be funded correctly (when they were hired) but later cuts made them underfunded.

Are you serious? You expect a 22 year old firefighter to know how well funded the pension system is?

Give me a break.

That blame seems misplaced given the end state.

When the folks making crazy promises are dead and/or gone by the time their promises are broken when the funds come up short, the workers who took the good deal are left holding the bag.

We must retroactively assign blame to the worker who was lured into accepting obvious false promises. It is perversely the most compassionate thing we can do: blame and shame past workers for making stupid deals. We do this so that future generations will learn the hard lesson that governments cannot be trusted with their investments. There is no power in investment.

Blaming past politicians for their malfeasance is exactly how we enable today's politicians to keep kicking the can down the road.

There's lots of proposals in this thread to inflict the consequences on the workers.

I have never seen this to be the case. Do you have any data?