zlacker

>>gwintr+(OP)
The saddest thing to me about this - is the cut of pensions.

My parents view pensions as gold standard. That it cannot be messed with and clearly this article shows that it can. The promise for your years of service can't be paid out.

Now something you believed would allow you to not worry until your passing, perhaps leave a small something to your children, won't be. Instead, you're beginning to worry about how you'll make ends meet in a few years with all the rising prices.

>>irjust+dA
Honestly, I think people are beginning to see pensions through the lens of the common adage "if something is too good to be true, it probably is". I just think it's a sign of the times where the population isn't expanding as rapidly and the promises made by pensions simply can't be kept.

>>mgh95+xB
It was always a fraud of future promises, an actual and literal con job. It is the inherent risk of trusting others, strangers nonetheless, with your own future, let alone “retirement”.

It is another one of those core metrics, even if a lagging one, that should be used to evaluate whether government has failed; the delta between how secure someone would currently be if they had just invested all the pension/social security money that was stolen/defrauded from them.

Most of our governments would be exposed as the failed governments they are.

>>hoseyo+xC
This goes directly to the question of the PBGC giving bailouts (https://www.pbgc.gov/arp-sfa) rather than windups and dissolution.

These bailouts -- and the decisions if a pension fund should be forcibly closed -- are political in nature. For example, Biden bailing out the Teamsters pension fund (https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...) or the decision by congress to ignore the fact that CalPERS has continuously below the 80% recommended funding for non-governmental pensions putting a 1.7T time bomb in play.

In essence, government is failing to play one of its more essential roles of regulator.