<p>Nothing says predicting the future like saving for retirement, and when somebody else is supposedly saving for retirement for you, that is a recipe for disaster. The bailout of the auto industry was to keep the pension payments going to their almost one-million retirees. Puerto Rico is seeking statehood in a last ditch effort to save their pensions, and of course, the Wall Street bailout was all about saving the pension funds which had invested, not the banks. The numbers are staggeringly bad: of the 1,400 private, union-run pension plans, three-quarters are less than half funded, a total $600 billion deficit, and public sector pensions obligations are truly astonishing, almost $6 trillion: a twentieth of all the wealth in America is owed to retired government workers. But that's dwarfed by the immorality of Social Security, which requires a full quarter of America's total wealth just to make up the difference between what's owed and what's paid in, made even worse because all the paid-in monies have been absorbed into the Debt, so aren't available anyway. We are literally talking about taking from the poor, productive members of society, and giving to the rich, unproductive retirees. Combine that with sanctimonious mewling, abuse of social courtesy, and political grandstanding, and the mess that results has no solution short of a complete financial breakdown, scraping the bottom, and rebuilding after shedding the pension baggage.</p>
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