Many people get infuriated by President Trump’s many inconsequential falsehoods — does it really matter how big his inaugural crowds were? — but they remain sanguine about the trillion-dollar untruths that our public pension system is built upon. The big lie that governments will make good on retirement promises to their employees is not merely mendacious but it is destructive. Millions of Americans have built their retirement plans around a fiction. And when the Ponzi scheme collapses, government workers won’t be the only ones to suffer.
In his latest column, George Will recites some of the more glaring examples of how the big lie is unraveling.
The Dallas police and fire fund recently sought a $1.1 billion transfusion, a sum roughly equal to the city’s entire general fund budget yet still not close to what is needed. Last year Illinois reduced its expected return on its teacher retirement fund portfolio from 7.5% annually to 7% (which is arguably still too optimistic), meaning that the state needs to add $400 million to $500 more to the fund — annually. Last September, the vice chair of the agency in charge of Oregon’s pension system wept when speaking about the state’s unfunded pension promises of $22 billion. Nationally, unfunded liabilities for teachers, not counting other government employees, amount to at least $500 billion.
And don’t get me started on the fact that the Medicare hospital trust fund is expected to run out in only 12 years and Social Security trust fund in 16 years, at which point payroll tax revenues will be insufficient to maintain full benefits… Or the fact that the pensions run by companies in the S&P 1500 Index were unfunded to the tune of $562 billion.
Some of the shortfall can be attributed to absurdly generous provisions of pension plans in particular states and localities, some to fiscal indiscipline by government at all levels, and some to the Fed’s seven years of near-zero interest-rate policies that have depressed returns on bond portfolios and juiced stock market gains that cannot possibly be replicated in the years ahead.
Will concludes with the salient point:
The problems of state and local pensions are cumulatively huge. The problems of Social Security and Medicare are each huge, but in 2016 neither candidate addressed them, and today’s White House chief of staff vows that the administration will not “meddle” with either program. Demography, however, is destiny for entitlements, so arithmetic will do the meddling.
Few elected officials are willing to deal with the issue that offers no immediate political reward. Here in Virginia, one of the few, House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, has announced that he will not seek re-election.
Thanks in part to Howell’s stewardship, Virginia’s budget, backed by a AAA bond rating, is in better shape than those of many other states. But the U.S. learned after the 2007 real estate crash what AAA bond ratings are worth when the economy shifts from normal conditions to crisis conditions. Boomergeddon is coming. The only question is when.
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