Accounting change bloats US pension gap
Cash-strapped US states will see the reported shortfalls in their public pension funds grow sharply under new accounting standards likely to be approved on Monday that could add up to $600bn to official estimates of the holes in states’ pension funds.
Public pensions have become a highly contentious issue in the US in recent years. Stock market losses during the financial crisis exacerbated years of underfunding of retirement promises made to state and local government workers, resulting in fears of ballooning gaps at a time when state budgets are still tight from the recession. That has prompted many states to push for cuts to benefits, prompting an intense backlash from unions.
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The new standards “will better reflect the economic reality,” said Robert Attmore, chairman of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB).
One GASB proposal would affect how public pension funds report their assets. Currently, funds measure their assets using “smoothing”, a controversial accounting technique that has enabled governments to spread losses over several years and prevent reported assets from fluctuating along with their market values. The GASB proposal would require them to mark to market annually.
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Those things were put out of business by the psychotic criminals who grabbed charge of things.
Now we let the Greek people starve but give their banks bailouts. How obscene and stupid is that.
Moral economies, dare I say Judeo-Christian-Islamic economies work from the bottom up, not through legislative theft of pensions, educations funds, home equity, business equity and savings by allowing speculators to turn our economy into a casino, a Ponzi game with only a few people able to have any control over what happens by threatening and buying politicians, stealing citizens votes with bizarre schemes and they make sure that it all happens for them and that our schools, media, churches and businesses keep telling us this is all we deserve, that this is correct and moral.
I keep gong back to this. Sodom and Gomorrah were not destroyed because people had a lot of sex, they were destroyed because Lot's was the last righteous family there. The righteous people put Clinton back in office and then faded away.
In Germany they ended up rounding them up as enemies of the state. We have that scenario already legally in place, with a Supreme Court that upholds a party not the Constitution and a Administration that at best is just trying to keep from being swept out of office by crazed mobs who don't know who they should be angry with for their many losses, safety, schools, infrastructure, a future, security and devaluation as citizens and people through disenfranchisement, criminalizing poverty and not dealing the people who are the Gomarrahites among us today.
The biggest lies there are are that the rich deserve their wealth, that they should decide for the rest, that they are benevolent, moral and wise.
