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Thursday, December 28, 2017

Forget The Phony Pension Accounting, Here's How Much Your State Pension Is Really Underfunded

The phony assumptions that go into calculating public pension underfundings in the United States are a frequent topic for us. As our readers are aware, state pension administrators are given fairly wide leeway to simply pick a discount rate out of thin air. Of course, since pensions are nothing but a massive stream of future liabilities that stretch out into perpetuity, every 100 bps increase can substantially, and artificially, lower the fund's reported underfunded level.

In fact, we estimated the impact of higher discount rates on underfunding levels in a post entitled "An Unsolvable Math Problem: Public Pensions Are Underfunded By As Much As $8 Trillion"...here was the result:

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

All you have to do is look to the recent Greece financial crisis to see how this Will play out.

Anonymous said...

Funny that the most liberal states have the most underfunded liabilities.

Anonymous said...

The governments (all levels) have lied to the workers.
It should have never been more lucrative to work for the government than for business.
The fact that people earned (and still do) more money by working for the government is a clue that we live in a tyrannical society.

Those who have purchased the government (campaign funding) have lied to the workers.
It is criminal.

They were promised one thing, but then, the criminal government never funded the pension properly.
They lied and committed fraud.