The folks at the Fox Business Network asked me to expand on my blog posting below, who is next? The video starts off in the middle of a discussion about rising welfare rolls in America, then segues to the topic of bankruptcies. Click on the 'continue reading' button below the video for a look at a chart that illustrates my point about the ratio of workers in public pensions to retirees, which is declining.
Here you can see the ratio of workers to retirees collecting benefits in government pension funds, which has declined in just a decade by half a worker. Since workers and employers (that is, governments) are supposed to be contributing to plans to fund the retirement of current workers, not those already retired, this shouldn't be a problem. But of course we have massively underfunded our current pension systems and so contributions from current workers have become important to the viability of some pension systems. In New Jersey, where state government has made few significant contributions to pensions over the last decade, contributions deducted from workers represented virtually the only money going into the system, to take one example. Meanwhile, the number of beneficiaries collecting checks from state and local pension funds soared 38 percent in the decade.
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