{"id":23338,"date":"2017-03-27T12:39:56","date_gmt":"2017-03-27T17:39:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23338"},"modified":"2017-03-27T12:39:56","modified_gmt":"2017-03-27T17:39:56","slug":"your-pension-could-be-at-the-center-of-americas-next-financial-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23338","title":{"rendered":"Your pension could be at the center of America’s next financial crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Your pension could be at the center of America’s next financial crisis<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n
\n
<\/header>\n
\n
\"Your<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

I\u2019m not a fan of the \u201cgreed is good\u201d mentality of Wall Street investment firms. But the next financial crisis that rocks America won\u2019t be driven by bankers behaving badly. It will in fact be driven by pension funds that cannot pay out what they promised to retirees. According to one pension advocacy organization, nearly\u00a01 million working and retired Americans<\/a>\u00a0are covered by pension plans at the risk of collapse.<\/p>\n

The looming pension crisis is not limited by geography or economic focus. These including former public employees, such as members of South Carolina\u2019s government pension plan, which covers roughly\u00a0550,000 people<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 one out of nine state residents \u2014 and is a staggering\u00a0$24.1 billion in the red<\/a>. These include former blue collar workers such as roughly\u00a0100,000 coal miners<\/a>\u00a0who face serious cuts in pension payments and health coverage thanks to a nearly\u00a0$6 billion shortfall<\/a>\u00a0in the plan for the United Mine Workers of America. And when the bill comes due, we will all be in very big trouble.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s bad enough to consider the philosophical fallout here, with reneging on the promise of a pension and thus causing even more distrust of bankers and retirement planners. But I\u2019m speaking about a cold, numbers-based perspective that causes a drag on many parts of the American economy. Consider the following.<\/p>\n

Pensioners have no flexibility<\/p>\n

According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics\u00a0report from 2015<\/a>, the average household income of someone older than age 75 is $34,097 and their average expenses exceed that slightly, at $34,382. It is not an exaggeration, then, to say that even a modest reduction in retirement income makes the typical budget of a 75-year-old unsustainable \u2014 even when the average budget is far from luxurious at current levels. This inflexibility is a hard financial reality of someone who is no longer able to work and is reliant on means other than labor to make ends meet.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your pension could be at the center of America’s next financial crisis I\u2019m not a fan of the \u201cgreed is good\u201d mentality of Wall Street investment firms. But the next financial crisis that rocks America won\u2019t be driven by bankers behaving badly. It will in fact be driven by pension funds that cannot pay out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[312,15031,1816,3075,827,860],"class_list":["post-23338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-financial-crisis","tag-jeff-reeves","tag-pensions","tag-social-security","tag-united-states","tag-wall-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23338"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23339,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23338\/revisions\/23339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}