Posted on 03/15/2009 7:29:50 PM PDT by Vince Ferrer
The Teacher Retirement System of Texas has sustained investment losses that were billions of dollars more than expected, according to a newly released valuation.
On Friday, state lawmakers were soberly assessing the report, which showed that the pension's unfunded liabilities have more than tripled in six months, to $40.4 billion from $11.5 billion. That shortfall will eventually have to be made up, or in the long term the pension won't be able to meet its obligations to all its members.
(Excerpt) Read more at star-telegram.com ...
***I have always suspected that the push for HillaryCare is not about getting better care, but through lowering the cost of care through rationing care to the sick. ***
I’t’s worse than that. It costs more for everything that the government runs over the cost of what a private business runs. Socialized health care will cost the taxpayers more, even with the government cutting down of care for EVERYBODY!
Since no one is bailing my pension out since it is personal, not a group, why should I or anyone be bailing out unions and public sector workers? Simply put, NO CONTRACT BASED ON FANTASY IS ENFORCEABLE.
What happened to all the lotto money? And smoke taxes and property taxes, etc? More tax isn’t the answer. They’ll just figure a way to waste more $$$$$$
He can't ration what he does not have control over, yet.
And remember this, oh boomer generation, who advocated the "right to die," when they were young. They insisted that euthanasia be done by doctors to give their movement the cover of being "medicine," to force the inconvenient hypocratic oath out of the new morality. Well, euthanasia is a pretty cheap treatment compared to geriatric medicine.
Guess they’ll just have to keep on working like the rest of us - or join 0bama’s brownshirts.
Idiot politicians and bureaucraps have been way too generous with pensions for decades now. Damn fools have not had any idea of what it takes to fund them and just ignored the issue.
They have counted on raising taxes. I’ve tried to explain to my mother for years that in spite of her paying into the teacher’s retirement system the amount she paid can’t come close to the NPV of what she will take out of the system.
Her medical bills are more than I could ever pay and she is healthy for her age. Going to the doctor is like a pastime for her and the docs don’t back up an inch from the medicare payments.
My father on the other hand was a great bargain for the feds. He paid into Federal Employees Retirement System from age 30 to 67, retired, lived less than 10 years, took the high option leaving mom with very little of his retirement.
The NPV of a fireman or police officers pension is way over $2,000,000...no way can they put that much in during the period they work.
Pension funds are EFFED up and the only way out is to tax the hell out of the youngsters or kill off the old. I think they will go for the latter or we will be faced with the most poverty stricken geriatric population ever.
>> What happened to all the lotto money? And smoke taxes and property taxes, etc? More tax isn’t the answer.
Of course more tax isn’t the answer. But the more you feed them the more they want.
Bloat has infected TX local governments too. Municipalities and school boards and county courts spend WAY more money than they should — and their borrowing habits make subprime mortgage abusers look thrifty by comparison. Debt service is 50%, and destined to go higher. Even in districts like mine that are supposedly “conservative”.
They’ll just put their hands out and ask for a bail-out. Why not? Every other sorry poor investment is.
LOL!! Here in Nevada, our previous RINO governor Kenny Guinn started the "Millennium Scholarship" with the tobacco settlement money. Basically, any high school grad with a pulse got a free ride to a Nevada university. Boy howdy did UNR and UNLV go nuts soaking up that money, building ivory towers as fast as the architects could hit "PRINT". And the "Millennium" scholars? Most kids lost their scholarships with bad grades, i.e. they never belonged in college in the first place.
The fund is pretty much gone and the current governor is asking the universities to cut 50% of their budgets. "O' woe is us!" cry the educrats!
There is an established federal fund for bailing out overblown pensions. It hasn't been fully funded either :)
This goes back to the basic problem of the Fed keeping artificially low interest rates over the last few decades while increasing the monetary supply. The low interest rates discouraged savings. Investors had to look for increasingly risky vehicles to keep the returns high. If a safe loan could be paid back at 2-3%, obviously, getting a higher interest rate required a higher level of risk. Also, I don't know who the investment people are for the Teacher's Retirement Fund in Texas, but I do know that several pension funds, mine included, were pressured by politicians to buy these bad mortgages. This was the worst of all worlds, as they were investing in high risk loans with a low rate of return.
Texas teachers are forced to contribute to the TRS, while most 401(k) plans are optional for private sector employees. (Whenever I left a Texas public school job for a private teaching job or to move out of state, I always took the hit and withdrew my money.) If you have money forcibly removed from your income into a pension, and they poorly manage the money, after making all these promises to you about how they’re going to pay you for the rest of your life after you retire, I guess that’s justification to stick it to the rest of the tax base for the short-fall.
Interesting, just as with other government pension plans, that many ‘retired’ teachers know how to work around the loopholes in the system here in Texas and continue to work after ‘retirement’ enabling them to draw their pensions while still being employed, many times within the same district from which they retired, essentially double dipping.
Good post..
It’s a house of cards.
China is already wary of buying any more of our debt. It will require selling more debt in the future in order to bail out these funds. I doubt there will be anyone willing to purchase any more US debt at that time.
Our state retirement system has been in trouble for a few years, even before all this mess.
The sh*t’s going to hit the fan big time.
It'll be a train wreck and they know it.
Same thing they're doing in Cal now. They're shaking down the private sector, many of whom are on their knees, trying to keep the government pensions alive.
“Many pension funds bought mortgage backed securities that are now worth pennies on the dollar. So, retirees lose their own equity in their homes, and their pension fund drains away.”
Lot of pension funds in commercial real estate as well. Shopping malls, strip shopping centers, restaurants and office parks. As vacancy rates and bankruptcies rise they’ll feel the hit from these as well.
Saw an article last week where the govenator said the CA state employee pension plans are $49 billion in the hole and growing
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