Sunday, July 21, 2013
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)
Tags: unfunded liabilities, retiree pensions, government confiscation
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(NaturalNews) Last week, Detroit declared bankruptcy, becoming the largest city in U.S. history to take such drastic action in the face of financial insolvency. A declaration of bankruptcy isn't what most people think it is, though: it's not just a statement of "we're broke!" It's actually a way for the city to clear its slate of all financial obligations and not pay the retirees it owes.
What are the largest financial obligations the city facing? Pensions. $3.5 billion worth of pensions, to be exact.
Yes, Detroit owes former government employees -- teachers, firefighters, cops and more -- a whopping $3.5 billion in current and future payments. Except Detroit doesn't have $3.5 billion to pay the pensions. The city is in a state of economic collapse. Remember, the U.S. government used billions in taxpayer money to help General Motors move its manufacturing offshore to countries like China. As a result of economically-insane actions and criminal mismanagement, a city that used to be the hub of industrial output in America has become a ghost town of abandoned buildings, crumbling infrastructure and financial destitution.
But even as all this was becoming apparent, the government workers there continued to collect fat paychecks and pensions, all based on the promise that endless population growth would out-pace the rise in pension obligations. Many pensioners are owed over $100,000 a year from the government, and this is true across California, Illinois and many other states as well.
Chicago, for example, owes $19 billion in pension payments that it doesn't have, and the city of Los Angeles is more than $30 billion in the hole. The story is much the same in every major U.S. city.
As the Detroit Free Press now reports:
Early this year, the Pew Center released a survey showing that 61 of the nation's largest cities -- limiting the survey to the largest city in each state and all other cities with more than 500,000 people -- had a gap of more than $217 billion in unfunded pension and health care liabilities. While cities had long promised health care, life insurance and other benefits to retirees, "few ... started saving to cover the long-term costs," the report said.
Read that report here:
http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/Retire...
Detroit's bankruptcy being challenged
Realizing it flat-out doesn't have the money to pay these pension obligations, Detroit had little choice but to declare bankruptcy in an effort to avoid paying the pensions. In effect, this is a confiscation of all pension funds by the government, meaning that retired cops, firefighters, school teachers and so on will never see a dime of the pensions they thought they had earned.
Naturally, those who are owed the pensions are furious about all this. Imagine working 40 years on the job, building up a retirement only to have that retirement stolen from you by a local government that's steeped in corruption and financial mismanagement. The word "incompetent" doesn't even begin to describe Detroit's political leadership. It's more like "brain damaged" or "criminally insane."
But it's also commonplace. Across the country, city governments have all spent the pension funds instead of saving them. Almost no large city has the funds necessary to pay its obligations to retirees. Pension financial planning strategies are tragic nightmares of broken promises, dishonest politicians and delusional workers (who still somehow believe they're going to get paid).
In Detroit, the pensioners are fighting back, claiming Michigan's state constitution forbids cities like Detroit from wiping away pension obligations by declaring bankruptcy. It's all headed to the courts now, where even if Detroit's bankruptcy is nullified, the city still doesn't have the money to pay its pension obligations.
So it's a no-win situation regardless of the outcome. Where the money doesn't exist, nobody gets paid regardless of the legal wrangling in the courts.
Is Detroit "Too Big To Fail?" An Obama bailout may be imminent
There's already talk of Obama bailing out Detroit, meaning the federal government would take on the debt of the mismanaged city and its pension funds, eventually passing on those obligations to taxpayers all across the country.
Yep, that means you and I will be paying the $100,000 retirement pension of some ex-cop in Detroit. It's all part of the federal government's new plan to reward waste and punish fiscal responsibility.
No wonder Sen. Rand Paul says Detroit will only be bailed out "over my dead body." As Breitbart.com reports, Sen. Paul has stated, on the record, "I basically say he [Obama] is bailing them out over my dead body because we don't have any money in Washington."
Breitbart.com goes on to state, "Paul said the reason he is going to fight to stop any efforts to bail out Detroit is that if the president succeeds in bailing it out, that will send a signal to the rest of cities and states nationwide that the federal government will bail them out to if they conduct reckless spending."
"Those who don't have their house in order, who are teetering on disaster, will continue to make bad decisions." - Sen. Rand Paul.
He's right, of course. But rewarding reckless spending has become the new sport in Washington, where globalist banks routinely receive hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts after losing money on outlandish derivatives bets that went sour.
If we bail out Detroit, then the precedent is set: The taxpayers will have to foot the bill to bail out Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, Seattle and every other city that's on the brink of financial disaster because bureaucrats are short-term thinkers who typically only think ahead to the next election, not the next generation.
"Public pension plans across the nation are in fiscal distress. Generally underfunded, most now require far greater contributions from governments than initially envisioned," writes the California Common Sense organization, which goes on to state:
In 2012-13, Los Angeles's pension costs are expected to rise to $1.3 billion, or 18% of the city's budgeted expenditures. In 2002-03, just 10 years ago, pension costs were only $157 million, or 3% of total expenditures. Over the last decade, pension costs have grown at an annual average growth rate of 25% and have outpaced spending growth for every major area of the city's budget.
"In April Moody's Investors Service warned it could downgrade the ratings of Chicago, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Portland and 25 other local governments and school districts as part of a change in how it factors public pensions into debt grades," writes Forbes.com. "In Chicago, teachers' pensions alone cost $1 billion a year, while overall debt service accounts for close to a quarter of the city budget."
The top 10 biggest U.S. cities on the brink of pension bankruptcy
According to Business Insider, here are the top 10 U.S. cities whose pension obligations will soon collapse: (this article was originally published in 2010, so we have updated the "years" to reflect 2013)
#1 Philadelphia - Unfunded liability of $9 billion, $16,696 per household, only 1 year before the pension accounts are empty
#2 Chicago - Unfunded liability of $44.8 billion, $41.966 per household, money runs out in 4 years
#3 Boston - Unfunded liability of $7.5 billion, $30,901 per household, money runs out in 4 years
#4 Cincinnati - Unfunded liability of $2 billion, $15,681 per household, money runs out in 5 years
#5 St Paul - Unfunded liability of $1.4 billion, $13,686 per household, money runs out in 5 years
#6 Jacksonville - Unfunded liability of $4 billion, $12,944 per household, money runs out in 5 years
#7 New York City - Unfunded liability of $122 billion, $38,866 per household, money runs out in 6 years
#8 Baltimore - Unfunded liability of $3.7 billion, $15, 420 per household, money runs out in 7 years
#9 Detroit - Unfunded liability of $6.4 billion, $18,643 per household, money runs out in 8 years
#10 Fort Worth - Unfunded liability of $2 billion, $7,212 per household, money runs out in 8 years
Note that some of these numbers were actually optimistic. Detroit, for example, was predicted to run out of money in 2021, yet it already declared bankruptcy in 2013. What you are looking at here is a looming cascade of municipality bankruptcies over the next 10 - 20 years.
Cascading financial collapse
Nobody saves in America anymore; not cities, not states and of course not the federal government which Obama has brought to the astonishing debt level of $16 trillion (it was only $8 trillion when he first took office). It begs the question: If the cities bail out the pensioners, and Washington bails out the cities, who's going to bail out Washington and its exploding debt?
The answer, of course, is nobody. Central banks all around the world are already sitting on far too much U.S. debt that's being eroded by the hour as the Federal Reserve commits "quantitative easing" that dilutes the global dollar supply. They aren't going to take on trillions more to bail out a nation now seen as a global imperialist bully that runs NSA spying on its own allies while routinely engaging in economic espionage through currency manipulations.
The American government is widely hated throughout the world today. Most nations probably wouldn't mind seeing the USA collapse into financial oblivion. And within a few years, they may just get their wish.
"On average, pensions consume nearly 20 percent of municipal budgets," writes Anthony Flint of The Atlantic Cities. "But if trends continue, over half of every dollar in tax revenue would go to pensions, and by some estimates in some cases would suck up 75 percent of all tax revenue."
Financial collapse is not a doomsday conspiracy theory; it is mathematical inevitability
The upshot of all this is that if you are counting on a government pension to pay your bills during your retirement years, you may need to write that off because it probably won't be there for very much longer.
This is true not just for local and state government workers, but also for federal government workers. Yep, all those TSA agents, DHS workers and FDA bureaucrats are going to see their own pensions stolen, and I can't say that I'm shedding tears over TSA goons not getting their pensions. ("Pedophilia pensions!")
"I mean the statistics in California are staggering," said Sen. Rand Paul. "I think there's over 100,000 people there getting over $100,000 a year in retirement. You got police chiefs in medium-sized cities getting $350,000 a year for a salary. It's become untenable. But the main thing is we cannot send a signal from the federal government that cities and states are going to be too big to fail."
Where all this really hurts, though, is at the local level. In most cities, people like firefighters, cops and school teachers are wildly under-paid. They dedicate their lives to serving the community, often putting their own lives at risk in the process. Stealing their pensions is especially malicious given how much they have sacrificed to earn them.
But there's nothing that can be done to save them at this point. The mathematics are already in motion and unstoppable. Nearly all big-city pension obligation projections have been based on the false assumption that endless economic growth would provide a never-ending tax base from which pension obligations could be paid. That assumption, however, was a willful delusion in which city managers and bureaucrats happily engaged.
There is a day of reckoning coming for America, and it's going to be a day of nationwide outrage as pensions all across the country are confiscated or destroyed in a cascading chain of bankruptcies. At the same time, the federal government will no doubt embark on a Cyprus-style private bank account confiscation program that steals private wealth from the American people. Wiring money out of the country will be made illegal, and all forms of wealth -- including retirement accounts -- will be subject to government confiscation.
At that point, only people who have gone to great lengths to protect their assets will have anything left. What holds value in such a scenario? Land, bullets, rifles, hand tools, stored food, silver coins, gold coins, iodine disinfectants and antibiotics, to name a few obvious items. Skills and education also rank high.
Detroit's bankruptcy tells us the era of financial demise has begun. Now it's only a matter of time before what happened to Detroit spreads to Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and other large U.S. cities. It is no coincidence that DHS and the feds are now routinely running paramilitary police state training exercises in high-density urban areas.
As bad as pensions are, unfunded health care liabilities are far worse
For the real story on all this, take everything you've just read about unfunded pensions and dig that hole ten times deeper. Because the unfunded health care obligations are ten times worse.
According to the Pew research document at www.Pewstates.org , a fiscal assessment of 61 large U.S. cities revealed that while pensions are 74% funded, retiree health care liabilities are only 6% funded.
You read that correctly: cities have only saved 6 cents on the dollar for what they're going to need to pay the health care costs of retirees. And that's assuming health care costs don't keep skyrocketing thanks to hare-brained monopoly programs like Obamacare which lock in guaranteed monopolies to the drug companies, cancer centers and hospitals that now extract nearly one out of every four dollars of economic activity generated in across America.
Here's the chart:
What this means in reality is that health care obligations will have to be abandoned. So at the same time cities confiscate pension funds, they will also abandon health care obligations.
For many retirees, this means they will lose their pensions and their health care benefits at the same time.
This is what will ultimately lead to widespread riots in the streets followed by the police state crackdown that the federal government has been planning with its purchase of billions of rounds of ammunition, thousands of armored assault vehicles, full-auto assault rifles and other equipment to be used on the streets of America. The IRS is now training with AR-15s in order to engage American taxpayers at gunpoint. Even the Wall Street Journal now admits that the militarization of American police is wildly out of control, saying:
Law-enforcement agencies across the U.S., at every level of government, have been blurring the line between police officer and soldier. Driven by martial rhetoric and the availability of military-style equipment -- from bayonets and M-16 rifles to armored personnel carriers -- American police forces have often adopted a mind-set previously reserved for the battlefield.
This also tells you why government is secretly begging for a mass pandemic to wipe out all the elderly people in America: it would save cities and states from bankruptcy! No wonder government loves to promote Big Pharma -- it's the fastest way to kill people off and therefore not have to pay their retirement benefits. Longevity is the enemy of government because the longer you live, the more you collect in benefits. The sooner you die, the more you help government meet its unfunded financial obligations.
I wouldn't be surprised to find the White House one day running a new public relations campaign with the message "Kill yourself. It's good for America."
Or "Suicide is patriotic."
Sources for this story include:
1) My memory, experience, observations and reasoning.
2) http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/Retire...
3) http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2013/07/12/the-truce-that-coul...
4) http://www.nber.org/digest/mar11/w16453.html
5) http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/09/next-big-fi...
6) http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/07/19/Exclusive-Rand-Pau...
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/041298_unfunded_liabilities_retiree_pensions_government_confiscation.html#ixzz2ZuIpJJVq
The Tip Of The Iceberg Of The Coming Retirement Crisis That Will Shake America To The Core
By Michael Snyder, on July 22nd, 2013
The pension nightmare that is at the heart of the horrific financial crisis in Detroitis just the tip of the iceberg of the coming retirement crisis that will shake America to the core. Right now, more than 10,000 Baby Boomers are hitting the age of 65 every single day, and this will continue to happen every single day until the year 2030. As a society, we have made trillions of dollars of financial promises to these Baby Boomers, and there is no way that we are going to be able to keep those promises. The money simply is not there. Yes, I suppose that we could eventually see a "super devaluation" of the U.S. dollar and keep our promises to the Baby Boomers using currency that is not worth much more than Monopoly money, but as it stands right now we simply do not have the resources to do what we said that we were going to do. The number of senior citizens in the United States is projected to more than double by the middle of the century, and it would have been nearly impossible to support them all even if we weren't in the midst of a long-term economic decline. Tens of millions of Americans that are eagerly looking forward to retirement are going to be in for a very rude awakening in the years ahead. There is going to be a lot of heartache and a lot of broken promises.
What is going on in Detroit right now is a perfect example of what will soon be happening all over the nation. Many city workers stuck with their jobs for decades because of the promise of a nice pension at the end of the rainbow. But now those promises are going up in smoke. There has even been talk that retirees will only end up getting about 10 cents for every dollar that they were promised.
Needless to say, many pensioners are extremely angry that the promises that were made to them are not going to be kept. The following is from a recent article in the New York Times...
Many retirees see the plan to cut their pensions as a betrayal, saying that they kept their end of a deal but that the city is now reneging. Retired city workers, police officers and 911 operators said in interviews that the promise of reliable retirement income had helped draw them to work for the City of Detroit in the first place, even if they sometimes had to accept smaller salaries or work nights or weekends.“Does Detroit have a problem?” asked William Shine, 76, a retired police sergeant. “Absolutely. Did I create it? I don’t think so. They made me some promises, and I made them some promises. I kept my promises. They’re not going to keep theirs.”
But Detroit is far from an isolated case. As Detroit Mayor Dave Bingsaid the other day, many other cities are heading down the exact same path...
"We may be one of the first. We are the largest. But we absolutely will not be the last."
Yes, Detroit's financial problems are immense. But other major U.S. cities are facing unfunded pension liabilities that are even worse.
For example, here are the unfunded pension liabilities for four financially-troubled large U.S. cities...
Detroit: $3.5 billion
Baltimore: $680 million
Los Angeles: $9.4 billion
Chicago: $19 billion
When you break it down on a per citizen basis, Detroit is actually in better shape than the others...
Detroit: $7,145
Baltimore: $7,247
Los Angeles: $8,437
Chicago: $13,355
And many state governments are in similar shape. Right now, the state of Illinois has unfunded pension liabilities that total approximately $100 billion.
There are some financial "journalists" out there that are attempting to downplay this problem, but sticking our heads in the sand is not going to make any of this go away.
According to Northwestern University Professor John Rauh, the total amount of unfunded pension and healthcare obligations for retirees that state and local governments across the United States have accumulated is 4.4 trillion dollars.
So where are they going to get that money?
They are going to raise your taxes of course.
Just check out what is happening right now in Scranton, Pennsylvania...
Scranton taxpayers could face a 117 percent increase in taxes next year as the city's finances continue to spiral out of control.A new analysis by the Pennsylvania Economy League projects an $18 million deficit for 2014, an amount so massive it outpaces the approximate $17 million the struggling city collects annually
A 117 percent tax increase?
What would Dwight Schrute think of that?
Perhaps you are reading this and you are assuming that your retirement is secure because you work in the private sector.
Well, just remember what happened to your 401k during the financial crisis of 2008. During the next major stock market crash, your 401k will likely get absolutely shredded. Many Americans will probably see the value of their 401k accounts go down by 50 percent or more.
And if you have stashed your retirement funds with the wrong firm, you could end up losing everything. Just ask anyone that had their nest eggs invested with MF Global.
But of course most Americans are woefully behind on saving for retirement anyway. A study conducted by Boston College's Center for Retirement Research found that American workers are $6.6 trillion short of what they need to retire comfortably.
That certainly isn't good news.
On top of everything else, the federal government has been recklessly irresponsible as far as planning for the retirement of the Baby Boomers is concerned.
As I noted yesterday, the U.S. government is facing a total of 222 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities. Social Security and Medicare make up the bulk of that.
At this point, the number of Americans on Medicare is projected to grow from a little bit more than 50 million today to 73.2 million in 2025.
The number of Americans collecting Social Security benefits is projected to grow from about 56 million today to 91 million in 2035.
How is a society with a steadily declining economy going to care for them all adequately?
Yes, we truly are careening toward disaster.
If you are not convinced yet, here are some more numbers. The following stats are from one of my previous articles entitled "Do You Want To Scare A Baby Boomer?"...
1. Right now, there are somewhere around 40 million senior citizens in the United States. By 2050 that number is projected to skyrocket to 89 million.
2. According to one recent poll, 25 percent of all Americans in the 46 to 64-year-old age bracket have no retirement savings at all.
3. 26 percent of all Americans in the 46 to 64-year-old age bracket have no personal savings whatsoever.
4. One survey that covered all American workers found that 46 percentof them have less than $10,000 saved for retirement.
5. According to a survey conducted by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, "60 percent of American workers said the total value of their savings and investments is less than $25,000".
6. A Pew Research survey found that half of all Baby Boomers say that their household financial situations have deteriorated over the past year.
7. 67 percent of all American workers believe that they "are a little or a lot behind schedule on saving for retirement".
8. Today, one out of every six elderly Americans lives below the federal poverty line.
9. More elderly Americans than ever are finding that they must continue working once they reach their retirement years. Between 1985 and 2010, the percentage of Americans in the 65 to 69-year-old age bracket that were still working increased from 18 percent to 32 percent.
10. Back in 1991, half of all American workers planned to retire before they reached the age of 65. Today, that number has declined to 23 percent.
11. According to one recent survey, 70 percent of all American workers expect to continue working once they are "retired".
12. According to a poll conducted by AARP, 40 percent of all Baby Boomers plan to work "until they drop".
13. A poll conducted by CESI Debt Solutions found that 56 percent of American retirees still had outstanding debts when they retired.
14. Elderly Americans tend to carry much higher balances on their credit cards than younger Americans do. The following is from a recent CNBC article...
New research from the AARP also shows that those ages 50 and over are carrying higher balances on their credit cards -- $8,278 in 2012 compared to $6,258 for the under-50 population.
15. A study by a law professor at the University of Michigan found that Americans that are 55 years of age or older now account for 20 percentof all bankruptcies in the United States. Back in 2001, they only accounted for 12 percent of all bankruptcies.
16. Between 1991 and 2007 the number of Americans between the ages of 65 and 74 that filed for bankruptcy rose by a staggering 178 percent.
17. What is causing most of these bankruptcies among the elderly? The number one cause is medical bills. According to a report published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor inmore than 60 percent of the personal bankruptcies in the United States. Of those bankruptcies that were caused by medical bills, approximately 75 percent of them involved individuals that actually did have health insurance.
18. In 1945, there were 42 workers for every retiree receiving Social Security benefits. Today, that number has fallen to 2.5 workers, and if you eliminate all government workers, that leaves only 1.6 private sector workers for every retiree receiving Social Security benefits.
19. Millions of elderly Americans these days are finding it very difficult to survive on just a Social Security check. The truth is that most Social Security checks simply are not that large. The following comes directly from the Social Security Administration website...
The average monthly Social Security benefit for a retired worker was about $1,230 at the beginning of 2012. This amount changes monthly based upon the total amount of all benefits paid and the total number of people receiving benefits.
You can view the rest of the statistics right here.
Sadly, most Americans are not aware of these things.
The mainstream media keeps most of the population entertained with distractions. This week it is the birth of the royal baby, and next week it will be something else.
Meanwhile, our problems just continue to get worse and worse.
There is no way in the world that we are going to be able to keep all of the financial promises that we have made to the Baby Boomers. A lot of them are going to end up bitterly disappointed.
All of this could have been avoided if we would have planned ahead as a society.
But that did not happen, and now we are all going to pay the price for it.
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