Maggie's Farm

$3.2 trillion. (More here.) Plus near that over a full decade for ObamaCare.  Plus, the so-called Social Security trust fund is taking in less that is going out.  Plus, Medicare is already broke.  Plus, hundreds of millions of dollars added to states’ deficits by ObamaCare enlarging Medicaid. All adds up to minuses, from your pockets, from your health, from education and police and other services, from your future.

As the races for governor heat up in thirty-six states, the question of how to fix troubled state-sponsored pension plans may be one of the most challenging that candidates will have to face. State pension plans are underfunded by $3.2 trillion when misguided accounting practices are corrected according to research by Joshua D. Rauh, an associate professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management, and Robert Novy-Marx at the University of Chicago, published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Furthermore, because pension funds are highly exposed to market risks, there is only a 5 percent chance that they will perform well enough to meet the needs of retirees in fifteen years.