Wasting Time With Alex

A criminal enterpirse that makes Enron look tame..

Liberals love to tell us about the evils of capitalism, the greed of Wall Street, how the top people in big companies fleece us all, but nobody does it better than the liberal’s champion: government! Have a gander over to the WSJ and read about the underfunded Public Pensions and liabilities, and how big government is dealing with these problems:

Public employee pension plans are plagued by overgenerous benefits, chronic underfunding, and now trillion dollar stock-market losses. Based on their preferred accounting methods—which discount future liabilities based on high but uncertain returns projected for investments—these plans are underfunded nationally by around $310 billion.

Public pension administrators argue that government plans fundamentally differ from private sector pensions, since the government cannot go out of business. Even so, the only true advantage public pensions have over private plans is the ability to raise taxes. But as the Congressional Budget Office has pointed out in 2004, “The government does not have a capacity to bear risk on its own”—rather, government merely redistributes risk between taxpayers and beneficiaries, present and future.

Market valuation makes the costs of these potential tax increases explicit, while the public pension administrators’ approach, which obscures the possibility that the investment returns won’t achieve their goals, leaves taxpayers in the dark.

Get that? What’s good for the goose is not even close to being acceptable for the gander. No, really. And it gets worse: they don’t want us to know about it!

Some public pension administrators have a strategy, though: Keep taxpayers unsuspecting. The Montana Public Employees’ Retirement Board and the Montana Teachers’ Retirement System declare in a recent solicitation for actuarial services that “If the Primary Actuary or the Actuarial Firm supports [market valuation] for public pension plans, their proposal may be disqualified from further consideration.”

Scott Miller, legal counsel of the Montana Public Employees Board, was more straightforward: “The point is we aren’t interested in bringing in an actuary to pressure the board to adopt market value of liabilities theory.”

Enron was a greedy and evil corporation because of exactly this kind of stuff. However, government is not. That’s because these blood suckers figure they can always shaft the tax payer to cover their “exceedingly generous” debt obligations. And they need us to stay in the dark about it. This is the hope and change we are getting. Guess it pays to be part of the big government machine. Sucks bigtime otherwise. And we should not kid ourselves that Obama and his people would right now be nationalizing any private company doing what these public ones are doing, while demonizing capitalism, because they were abusing the public.