Which is bad news for all, but really bad news for those public-sector employees – especially in the US – who have funded the Democrat party for decades on the promise that they would be taken care of, lavishly, forever:
All around the world, pension tension is growing. You’re only beginning to see what I’ve been predicting for a long time. It’s one huge mess. Here is a small sampling of global pension tension:
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* Connecticut Treasurer Denise Nappier said on Monday the state is terminating its investment agreement with Dallas-based private equity firm Aldus Capital LLC, after it was caught up in the criminal and civil probe of the New York State pension fund.
* Teacher pension tsunami is expected across Pennsylvania. A bubble in the number of teachers expected to retire in the next decade and a 30 percent drop in the total value of the Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System’s (PSERS) assets last year in the souring economy means districts contribute more to the teachers’ retirement fund.
* Minnesota teachers are asking state lawmakers for a $223 million bailout for their pension fund. The Education Minnesota teachers’ union, their retirement association and other groups are asking the state Legislature for between $207 million and $223 million over four years to put their pension fund on sound footing.
* The protracted economic downturn has chewed up nearly a quarter of the value of Ohio’s five public pension plans, forcing their leaders to more seriously consider unpopular options such as dialing back cost-of-living increases and even raising retirement ages.
And that is just a sample of the sample, as it were. Lesson to be learned: You can’t spend your way into wealth. No, really – I’m not kidding: you have to earn wealth, not just have it showered upon you by a government which has to steal it from others. Eventually, the Piper has to be paid.
The economic bow is over-stretched. To be sure we, the people, played a large role in this with our irresponsible credit card borrowing (Me? Guilty.) and our housing speculations – but the primary culprit has been a government essentially commanding us to produce less and less wealth and rely ever more on government hand outs and crazy-quilt investment plans which are based, ultimately, on the productivity of slaves in China and sweated labor elsewhere in the Third World. We have to re-trench – we have to cut spending until revenues significantly exceed spending and thus start to pay off the debt we’ve wracked up. Meanwhile, we have to do everything in our power to encourage Americans to make, mine and grow things.
There is really no other way out of this mess – fiscal hocus-pocus by Obama and his Democrats might put a temporary healthy sheen on the economy, but that is like putting lipstick on a corpse. We need new life, and the only way we’re going to get that is by working hard and sacrificing.
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