Opinion

Liu’s dubious deal

Union bigs and City Comptroller John Liu, a likely mayoral candidate, teamed up with ex-President Bill Clinton yesterday to announce a deal to use $1 billion in teacher-pension-fund money for “post-Sandy reconstruction and other critical infrastructure” projects.

It’s supposedly part of a broader $10 billion “pledge” by the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Teachers and other groups to the Clinton Global Initiative to finance US infrastructure work.

Which, on the face of it, sounds fine — honorable, even.

But really it’s just more pandering by Liu & Co. to special interests — in this case, unions.

Worse, Liu proposes to shoot craps with public money.

Yes, the cost of recovering from Hurricane Sandy will be staggering. The governors from the tri-state area asked Washington for some $82 billion in disaster aid, and President Obama officially requested some $60 billion from Congress.

Even so, teacher-pension cash could prove useful.

But for years, unionists and politicians of Liu’s ilk have been casting covetous eyes on public-pension funds as a source of cash for unsound social-spending schemes.

Consider this plan just a foot in that dubious door.

Fact is, Liu — for all his incessant efforts to suck up to labor — can’t simply do as he pleases with the $126 billion in city pension money he oversees. (Though it would certainly not be beyond him to try.)

The primary job of public-pension managers is to maximize returns on behalf of employees. Not to pay for disaster relief.

And that $1 billion is a huge chunk of change — more than 2 percent of the teacher fund’s entire $46 billion value.

Spending it on Sandy-related projects, however compassionate-sounding, isn’t likely to be the most productive use for it — and so the move promises to be a violation of Liu’s fiduciary responsibility to earn the maximum return for the fund.

As it is, that fund saw a paltry 1.85 percent return on investments in the 2012 fiscal year — so it needs every penny it can get.

True, the fund’s trustees never actually decided to finance any specific Sandy-related project — even if Liu & Co. would like folks to think otherwise.

And so no damage has been done.

Yet.

But the comptroller has been talking out of both sides of his face since Day One — so no wonder the feds have been buzzing like bumblebees around his campaign for almost as long.

All the more reason to define this deal for what it is: a potentially risky pander.

And to abandon it.