The Central States Pension Fund has no new plan to avoid insolvency, fund director Thomas Nyhan said this week. Without government funding, the fund will run out of money in 10 years, he said.
At that time, pension benefits for about 407,000 people could be reduced to “virtually nothing,” he told workers and retirees in a letter sent Friday.
In a last-ditch effort, the Central States Pension Plan sought government approval to partially reduce the pensions of 115,000 retirees and the future benefits for 155,000 current workers.
The proposed cuts were steep, as much as 60% for some, but it wasn’t enough. Earlier this month, the Treasury Department rejected the plan because it found that it would not actually head off insolvency.
There is no way to imagine what the resource level of the Apocalypse will look like.
Back in the 80’s, we should have endured a prolonged period of shortage and misery, extending out from Carter’s years well into Reagan’s. That period of misery would have reset the balance. It would have hardened amygdalae. It would have beaten into people an irritation with the idea of welfare, government waste, and entitlement. It would have imbued the very concept of resources with value, to each individual. Once that was done, government would have run more efficiently, and that would have pushed off any threat to economic stability.
Instead, we didn’t get that. Reagan tapped the debt spigot. Resources began to flow freely, and it changed the very way we viewed them. Suddenly, everybody had a right to a house, and college, and birth control, and diapers, and health insurance, and food, and cell phones, and anything else they could think of. Foreigners deserve citizenship, and free money, and they should even be allowed to send that money to their home country, so their families can have free money there. Nothing is worth anything, and money grows on trees. There was literally no way to communicate to the public that such profligacy would lead to a total collapse of the economic system which provided those resources, and even if there were, you probably couldn’t make people care enough to do something. Their amygdalae had grown too weak.
It is impossible for us to imagine a world where people who worked their whole lives, and contributed to a pension fund, could just have all their contributions wasted away, and end up in their golden years with nothing – unable to even afford housing or food.
That day is already here, and we have not even begun the official Apocalypse. When the real Apocalypse begins, so will the misery, and it will be unlike anything we can presently imagine – and government will be helpless to stop it.
The one positive is, it will mark the end of liberalism, at least for this turn of the cycle.
[…] Pensions Will Go Away In The Apocalypse […]
Americans as a whole seem to lack an understanding of limits, boundaries, and risk. I recall meeting dozens of wealthy homeowners when I was a private banker who confidently assured me that home prices would “never” go down, and who as a result of this fairyland thinking leveraged themselves to the hilt. Fools.
Back in 1980 I was a huge Reagan lover, and still fit for the duping. Since I have more and more recoiled at the horror of each subsequent election [as well as the ballot alternatives].
My support for Trump is taking some hits [Sheldon Adelson]. Why do I admire Putin? Never seen a picture of him grinning with an arm around a monkey.
I pity people who have put money into pensions believing that they’d be taken care of by the government or corporations — this is such an r-selected thing to do. It may have made sense at a time when people were mostly homogeneous and civil society was vibrant and dependable, but now, we’re on our own.
I don’t expect any social security when I get old. It’s already spent.
One thing I learned from this blog, which I read daily, is how important it is to do things for myself. I shouldn’t expect anyone to help me, except my children … perhaps. I even look at my spouse differently, trying not to depend on him to do the things he regularly does such as finances, garbage, heavy stuff, etc.
Lately, I’ve been working hard in the garden, learning to grow vegetables scattered among the flowers, for example. It’s not much but it does show me how much I need to learn and how frighteningly dependent I am on the infrastructure of society and government. Being able to feed oneself is something my ancestors took for granted — for me, it’s a hard slog to make up for those years of shopping at Safeway.
Yes Ma’am. Good on you. I’ve been learning to garden myself. It’s a lifetime process. 10 yrs is only ten tries.
TPTB will prop up the pension system with 1’s and 0’s till hyperinflation has the mob’s rioting with flame and pitch forks. That magic time frame 2025 – 2030 still rings in my ears.
Makes sense why tptb are forcing the plebs to take lesser pensions, cause the pension funds that failed in the late 80’s and early 90’s in my country were all fixed by the monetary fed placing the 1’s and 0’s into there accounts to this very day, and into the future till death or collapse.
Be nice to retire like our Dad’s did on $180000 per year…
Was your dad’s 180,000 made worthless by inflation?