Public Pension Millionaires

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

And then you get this...

The Pension Fund Crisis Is Over

http://www.businessinsider.com/pensi...for-now-2014-1

Of course, it is an article about private funds, but in the lauding of Joe Dear's stewardship of Calpers, you get this...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-mo...b_4857667.html

[santafe2]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

How will be fund all this?

We won't. Life isn't fair. You can't trust political systems, you can only trust your closest friends. Most of this economic structure is make believe. It will never bear fruit. It's total BS, doesn't everyone understand this?

[charliebrown]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

This is true, governmental units have approved budgets each year.

Your tax bill = government budget x (your house price / total taxable real estate in your taxing district).

Now it may be true that increasing home prices make it "easier" to swallow those ever increasing budgets.

[don]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

these guys have it figured out . . .

Stephen Moore notes in a post further explicating the reams of deplorable data contained in the Open the Books expose of the Fortune 100s’ $1.2 trillion in corporate welfare:


Too many companies in America, from Boeing to AT&T, have come to regard government as a giant customer. They cheerlead for big government because they are among its chief beneficiaries.


So what happened to the Gipper’s crusade against Big Government? Read and weep.


By Stephan Moore


Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin will release his House Republican budget next week, and one of its themes will be the fighting against corporate welfare. Mr. Ryan says, “We can’t make the case to the American people that we are the reform party if we won’t reform the giant corporate-welfare state in Washington.” Bravo. Too bad so few of his colleagues agree with him.


It’s very simple, really: Republicans have to be willing to cut weak claims, not weak claimants, as Reagan budget director David Stockman used to say. But corporate welfare has strong claimants: deep-pocketed business interests that rely on federal largesse to pad their pockets and jack up stock prices.


Too many companies in America, from Boeing to AT&T, have come to regard government as a giant customer. They cheerlead for big government because they are among its chief beneficiaries.

So why hasn’t it happened? Why haven’t Republicans pledged to end corporate welfare as we know it? Part of the explanation is that too many politicians have gotten confused about the difference between free-market capitalism and crony capitalism. Democrats love welfare of any kind and seem to relish the idea of making big business government-dependent. President Obama, with his stimulus plans and his green-energy giveaways, has been a master at that.


The business interests have also gotten away with their taxpayer heist for too long by pretending that business subsidies are just a small, inconsequential part of the budget. Actually, it’s a surprisingly large mountain of cash — even if it is well hidden.

This week an Illinois-based watchdog group, Open the Books, issued a new report that scrupulously tallies up all federal grants, loans, direct payments, and insurance subsidies flowing to individuals and companies.

It examined all accounts from the Department of Commerce to the Department of Transportation and found that corporate-welfare payments from the federal government to the Fortune 100 companies, from 2000 to 2012, amounted to $1.2 trillion. I recommend a visit to the website openthebooks.com, if you can stomach it.

That $1.2 trillion number does not include the hundreds of billions of dollars in housing, bank, and auto-company bailouts in 2008 and 2009, because those payments are kept mostly invisible in the federal-agency books. It also doesn’t include the asset purchases of the Federal Reserve, indirect subsidies such as the ethanol mandate that enriches large agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland, or special tax breaks for wind and solar manufacturers.

Most of the payments Open the Books uncovered were contracts between government agencies and private firms. The largest of these are military-procurement deals with such firms as Lockheed Martin ($392 billion), General Dynamics ($170 billion), and United Technologies ($73 billion). At least taxpayers get services in exchange for these tax dollars.

Still, the overall size of the government-industrial complex makes it all the harder to cut federal spending, because the recipients of all this money become high-roller lobbying forces for higher appropriations.

Far less defensible is the $21.3 billion that was doled out in the form of outright income-transfer subsidies to corporate America. On average, each Fortune 100 company received about $200 million in such handouts. So who are the major corporate-welfare queens? The biggest grant recipients were General Electric ($380 million), followed by General Motors ($370 million), Boeing ($264 million), Archer Daniels Midland ($174 million), and United Technologies ($160 million).

About $8.5 billion of this largesse came in the form of taxpayer-subsidized loans. The big winners here were Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor Company, and other multibillion-dollar corporations whose franchisees received Small Business Administration loans.

Double- and triple-dipper Archer Daniels Midland got just under $1 billion for USDA farm-program loans, and this doesn’t include ethanol subsidies. Another $10 billion was doled out through federal insurance, often in the form of surety bonds. The No. 1 federal insurance program was the Export-Import Bank, with Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase both receiving more than $3 billion in such aid and Citigroup and Bank of America receiving more than $1.5 billion in taxpayer backstop insurance.

(Remember, this doesn’t include TARP money.) Deere, American Express, and even Walmart reeled in federal insurance as well. Amazingly, all but one of the Fortune 100 stood in the federal soup line to take at least some form of corporate-welfare benefit. In other words, as Open the Books founder Adam Andrzejewski puts it: “Mitt Romney had it wrong. When it comes to the Fortune 100, it’s 99 percent, not 47 percent, on some form of the government’s gravy train.”

Uncle Sam could save billions of dollars a year if it just limited corporate welfare to any firm with profits of $1 million or even $10 million or less and prevented double-dipping by prohibiting the Fortune 100 from receiving more than one form of federal assistance at a time.

Imagine for a moment that you are sitting on your couch watching TV and there is a knock on the door. There in a corporate suit is an employee of General Dynamics with a tin cup and he asks if you would contribute a dollar for a research project. You would slam the door in his face. But somehow when the government collects a dollar from each of us and gives the money to General Dynamics, this is considered in Washington a wise “investment.”

l Ryan wants to do that. So does Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. They are, alas, lonely voices in the GOP. Too many of their colleagues have come to regard farm subsidies to wealthy agribusinesses and Export-Import Bank loans to Boeing as Republican entitlements. And then Republicans wonder why the public holds them in such disdain.

— Stephen Moore is chief economist with the Heritage Foundation.

[Slimprofits]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

We won't. Life isn't fair. You can't trust political systems, you can only trust your closest friends. Most of this economic structure is make believe. It will never bear fruit. It's total BS, doesn't everyone understand this?

Closest friends and some relatives.

[don]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

I wouldn't underestimate the role of FIRE in this discussion. Municipal debt is a key driver of wealth transfer. Saddle up municipalities with pension debt, assuring them your management will provide adequate returns. Shift ever-more of the budget to these obligations. Increase munis. We're heading for the golden virtuous circle, methinks . . .

[Slimprofits]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

we won't. Life isn't fair. You can't trust political systems, you can only trust your closest friends. Most of this economic structure is make believe. It will never bear fruit. It's total bs, doesn't everyone understand this?

greed-proof not greed-free:

two millennia ago, sallust wrote the following: "when i was a callow young man, i plunged enthusiastically into public life. Instead of modesty, brazenness flourished; instead of self-restraint, bribery; instead of merit, avarice (...)my youthful weakness was corrupted and gripped by ambition. Although i refrained from the wicked ways of the rest, still the same craving for advancement that plagued them with ill-repute and jealousy plagued me too."(bell. Cat., iii.3) 22 centuries from now (if we make it), someone will be writing the same...anyone who think we can correct humans is similar to those who think that they will get it right "the next time"...

[BK]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

Slimprofits,
The reason for owning gold for insurance...protecting your self from humans acting as humans do...
regards.

[photon555]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

We should rethink the whole notion of "free" "public" education. Anytime somebody starts promoting something as "free" it turns into a money pit, and the quality sinks as the price rises. Locally controlled "public" education is a good idea for those who don't want to home school or send their kids to a private school, but many people don't value anything they believe is free. The current government controlled schools are a disgrace, and the Common Core propaganda scheme will destroy any remaining utility they have managed to retain. Read an 8th grade final exam from 100 years ago and you will weep to realize how much the current "educational" establishment has corrupted education. Many college graduates would be baffled by that 8th grade exam. What a waste of human potential the current system causes as it seeks its own promotion. The same people who brought us MIC and FIRE have "financialized" education for their own greedy gain, while the self described "progressives" (worshipers of the State) have subverted the curriculum to propagandize students with their own failed ideology. We rightly admire those teachers who somehow, against all odds, manage to instill a measure of true education among their students, but the overall direction of American education continues to plunge as ever more money is thrown at the problem.

[photon555]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

Sometimes a little doggerel makes the FIRE go down easier.

The Human Perdition

So you lust to be important
Can't abide to be unwanted
There's a solution for your condition
Sell your soul; become a politician

But you want to be a wanker?
Easy. Just become a banker
Grab the loot and pretend you're not a rat
Sold your soul; but your bank account is fat

Now you come to the end of days
Don't weep now for your errant ways
You made your choice and got all your desire
Lost your soul; now you'll go into the fire

Have a nice day.

If you have another verse please feel free to add it.

[don]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

One thing I don't miss in this 2nd Great Depression is the once near-unanimous, irrational belief by most Americans that someday that might be rich. Maybe that could be worked into a verse . . .

[Woodsman]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

One thing I don't miss in this 2nd Great Depression is the once near-unanimous, irrational belief by most Americans that someday that might be rich. Maybe that could be worked into a verse . . .

You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky (way up high)
Work and pray, live on hay
You'll get pie in the sky when you die

[jk]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

How will be fund all this?

easy. we will print enough dollars to meet all obligations. even alan greenspan knew that: "We can guarantee cash, but we cannot guarantee purchasing power!"

[vt]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

Zimbabwe already tried that; didn't work.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26034078

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Zimbabwe

[Slimprofits]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

Slimprofits,
The reason for owning gold for insurance...protecting your self from humans acting as humans do...
regards.

Here's another: 2400 years ago Artistotle said that constitutional government is a fusion of democracy and oligarchy.