South Carolina Has An Unfunded Pension Problem

It is debt saddling the system, or a future resource stream that won’t exist?

Billions in unfunded obligations in the South Carolina pension funds for state and local government workers, teachers and police officers are “a freight train out of control,” a state representative said Tuesday.

The unfunded obligations of the largest of those pension funds, the S.C. Retirement System, are expected to grow by $1.4 billion over the next year, according to actuarial firm Gabriel Roeder Smith and Co.

That system serves more than 180,000 state and local government employees, including teachers. Another 134,634 retirees also are part of the system.

The Retirement System has about $24 billion in assets, according to the Retirement System Investment Commission. But the system has $16.8 billion in unfunded liabilities — the difference between the amount the pension fund has to pay retirement benefits and the amount it has promised to pay. That red ink is expected to grow to $18.2 billion in the next budget year.

A group of state lawmakers held their first meeting Tuesday to try to come up with a way to meet the state’s unfunded pension obligations.

That is a single pension fund in one State, and it’s debt is growing over a billion dollars per year. It ignores local municipality debt, state debt, national debt, credit card debt, corporate debt, mortgage debt, student loan debt, car debt, and so on and so on. But by all means, lets blow 90 million digging up old bombs in Laos, or a billion importing mentally retarded foreigners who will immediately go on welfare. Better yet, lets just give $1.7 billion to Iran, in cash, for no reason.

It is really to the point that there is almost no corner of the economic ecosystem that you look at that isn’t either filled with debt, or artificially supported by debt. As the collapse approaches you can expect desperate politicians, like any scammer running a Ponzi scheme, to begin draining any source of money they can find to try and keep the scam afloat just long enough for them to drift out of government and avoid the blame. That will continue until it all comes down in one big cataclysm.

It really is funny. If government were a private sector business, one call to the FBI would trigger the most unbelievable investigation, everyone would end up locked up, and the entire country would be shocked by it all.

Instead, we are just cruising to the Apocalypse.