The Baltimore City Employees’ Retirement System (BCERS) is currently funded at about 70 percent of long-term liabilities, which is barely meeting the standard for government systems and not even close for private systems. Over the past five years, the fund earned a return of 12.5 percent while the S&P 500 index earned 15.88 percent. And now the director of the fund is headed to London to attend a week-long conference, all expenses paid.

Quick! What do you get outraged about first?

If you chose the trip, you join the ranks of a multitude of Americans that love to waste their time having conversations about chump change while completely ignoring the real issues.

Spending $5,600 for the BCERS director to attend an international conference is a completely reasonable cost for the exposure to other experts in her field and the knowledge she’ll be able to acquire there. Jeffrey C. Hooke, investment banker and author of two different Maryland Public Policy Institute reports on how to save public pensions, doesn’t even bat an eye at the expenses, calling them “nickel-and-dime stuff.”

And he is right to do so. The real issue with public pensions is the huge gap between what is promised and what the systems are funded to deliver—caused by expensive, actively managed funds that consistently under perform indexes.

To properly get a handle on the problem, the first step is to stop worrying about the small, reasonable expenses that are invariably incurred when running any enterprise. The second step is to stop wasting money on money managers and get the vast majority of BCERS (and all public pension funds) into index funds which cost significantly less and yet often perform better in the long term.

The combined savings on money managers (a couple hundred million annually for the state of Maryland) and increased returns would very quickly make conversations about travel expenses even more meaningless and inconsequential than they are today. And they would greatly benefit public employees and taxpayers, the two funding sources for public pensions.

Hopefully someone will be giving a talk about that at the London conference.