Part of the collapse in confidence we are experiencing with government stems directly from the fact that politicians engage in far more criminal behavior than anyone in the corporate world. While bankers may manipulate markets to trade against clients, politicians just lie to keep their jobs. The fact that they are incapable of managing the country, no less the economy, is coming to a head. The pension crisis we face emerges from all the promises of socialism. The crisis sprung from the fact that they don’t fund much of their promises and just assume there are enough schmucks to tax.
What played out in Detroit was critical but they ignored the problem. Pensions exceeded 50% of the budget and the city could not raise taxes because people just left town. Now in Kansas, workers are discovering that after 33 years they are facing a 51% cut to their pensions. The Central States Pension Fund that covers 400,000 participants (220,000 of them are retired) will go completely bust within 10 years.
This story will replay over and over again throughout the country on the other side of 2017.9 (Nov 24/25, 2017). We should begin to read more and more about this problem when we pass 2016.825 (October 28, 2016).