Crumbling quickly, thanks to the Obama economy.

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Note: This column went up at PJ Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Tuesday.

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An indicator of just how seriously the federal government’s financial situation has deteriorated (combined of course with the establishment press’s clear desire to emphasize “news” which might assist Dear Leader’s reelection effort) is that the dismal 2012 report released by the Social Security system’s trustees on April 23 received little attention. Viewed through that perverse prism, cash deficits which “will average about $66 billion between 2012 and 2018 before rising steeply,” even before considering the $110 billion or so taken from “general (non-existent) revenues” during 2011 and 2012 to make up for the payroll tax cut, pale in comparison to the importance of higher priorities — like working up a 5,400-word report riddled with errors and distortions on what Mitt Romney was doing when he was a teenager.

The sad, under-reported truth is that three years into an alleged “recovery,” the long-term outlook for Social Security continues to crumble at an accelerating rate.

It’s a crackup which was decades in the making. That’s because the government has scandalously used Social Security’s annual surpluses to fund the rest of its operations since President Lyndon Johnson began “including Social Security and all other trust funds in a ‘unified budget’” in the 1960s. Social Security’s so-called “Trust Funds” consist of nothing more than stacks of IOUs from the rest of a dangerously indebted government.

Instead, annual surpluses virtually vanished just two years later, thanks to the onset of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economyin roughly June of 2008. The Democratic Party’s permissive home lending-driven, securities fraud-enabled recession, followed by the Obama administration’s failure to choose policies which would have hastened a genuine recovery and acceptably grown the economy, brought things to a head with Social Security that much sooner. In the 2010 Trustees Report on 2009 results, tax collections were only $3 billion greater than benefits paid. 2010 went into the red by $49 billion, while 2011, after taking the payroll tax-cut reimbursements into account, had a deficit of $45 billion. After the 2012-2018 shorfalls cited earlier, annual cash deficits are projected to head quickly into the land of triple digits. If the economy doesn’t start generating significant growth and job creation, they might even arrive as quickly as the first cash deficits.

A few years ago, the Social Security system going cash-negative, especially so quickly, might have triggered the recognition of a widely acknowledged crisis. I thought it would be treated as one in a column three years ago. It hasn’t happened, even though its legitimacy as a genuine crisis is beyond reasonable dispute. Why not? I see only two reasons: A profoundly far-left Democratic administration, and a supportive and at least as far-left establishment press. This tipping point could not have occurred in a Republican or conservative presidential administration without the press and the left going into hysterics. If Barack Obama loses in November, I expect that the crisis will magically move to the front burner.

The left’s abandonment of anything resembling common sense is proceeding at a rate at least as fast as the nation’s fiscal meltdown. An ever-shrinking pool of liberals understands the basic notion that the perpetuation of their precious entitlement programs depends on a consistently robust economy to generate the tax collections necessary for its funding. Yet those who most vocally applaud the breakneck expansions of food stamps, wish to return to the traditional incentive-barren welfare as we once knew it before its reform in the mid-1990s, and most of all praise the inevitable cradle-to-grave control of health care inherent in ObamaCare, are among those who attack the nation’s successful job and taxable income creators the most stridently. Where’s the money for all of this government largesse going to come from if productive people — more properly phrased, if even more of them than have done so already — decide that working hard isn’t worth it?

Bill Clinton, for all his considerable and impeachable faults, understood the fundamental importance of having a strong economy. That understanding enabled him to let go of HillaryCare in 1994, and ultimately convinced him after a great deal of kicking and screaming into acquiescing to welfare reform. These moves, combined with an ineffective opponent, ensured his reelection in 1996. Clinton signed on to a capital gains tax cut in 1997 and signed off on the GOP Congress’s balanced budget plan formulated by then-Ohio Congressman John Kasich and pushed through by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich. For better or worse (I believe worse, but that’s for another day in another column), the booming economy which followed saved Clinton’s presidency in 1999.

Barack Obama, his administration, and his core supporters either don’t understand the importance of having a strong economy, or don’t care to. If it’s the former, they’re merely dumber than a box of rocks and really believe that their regime of reckless spending, rhetorical excess, and regulatory overreach will be consequence-free in the long run.

It’s far more probable that Obama and his inner circle know full well that they are wrecking the very entitlement programs they profess to love so dearly. They have convinced themselves that when it all falls apart and after the dust settles, they’ll have their hands more firmly on the levers of power, which to them seems to be all that really matters. We obviously can’t afford to test that belief, and we’re running out of opportunities to prevent it.

Monday evening, a Wall Street Journal editorial laid out the massive problems with the nation’s 1,400 multiemployer retirement plans, wherein “companies across an industry pay into a single asset pool.”

They’re in bad shape, as the Journal notes by referring to a detailed report worked up by Credit Suisse:

Multi-employer plans in the U.S. are underfunded by some $369 billion. An estimated $43 billion of that off-balance-sheet liability belongs to the 44 S&P 500 companies that are exposed to multi-employer plans. The other 88% of the $369 billion is borne by small, mid-cap or private firms that may be even less prepared to cover the obligations. The report says Safeway’s $6.9 billion in liabilities amount to 76% of the company’s market cap, for example.

All of this ought to be especially embarrassing to Washington, which requires annual filings to the Department of Labor on multi-employer plans and measures their financial health. But Labor uses an “actuarial” reading of the numbers, which envisions an average (and hefty) 7.5% rate of return on investments, smoothed over five years. Even under that generous view, about 500 plans—or 37%—are less than 80% funded and thus considered financially troubled.

7.5% is a barely defensible rate of return in a well-managed portfolio heavily weighted with equities, which isn’t (or shouldn’t be) the mix found in a prudently run pension plan.

But the problem with these plans — and any defined benefit plan in any industry or at any company, even in the public sector — is far more fundamental than that. In hindsight, everyone who set these plans up in the first place in the two decades after World War II should have known better. But we’ve really known for at least 30 years that they can’t work for one overarching reason: The world never stays the same.

A defined benefit plan inherently assumes at its start that the sponsor paying into the plan — the company, the industry of the government entity — will always be at least as big as or bigger than it was when it was set up, and at least as financially well-off or better off. If the sponsor and its employee base does grow, it then must stay at least that large indefinitely, and it must maintain the same or greater levels of employment.

In the real world over the long-term, this never happens (even in government, as we will eventually learn).

Thus, at some point:

• In an industry plan, if the industry shrinks, the smaller (and fewer) companies which remain and their relatively small workforces are in essence forced to pay the pensions (and often health benefits) of hordes of retirees from the industry’s heyday. Even this assumes that any new companies joining the industry will get involved with the multiemployer plan, which is certainly not a given.
• Looking at an individual company, sustainability is an even bigger problem. First, a company has a better chance of failing in the short run than its entire industry. Second — and this is crucial — even if a company remains successful while growing modestly, over time, because of productivity gains forced by competition, it will need fewer workers to produce its products and services. Thus there will be fewer workers to support legions of retirees even in a “successful” scenario.
• In government plans, there are additional perverse incentives. Unconstrained by competition in the short-run and possessing the power to tax its customers, it makes its pension plans ever more generous until they become unsustainable, even if employment holds steady. Compared to direct wage increases, making pension plans more generous is a less visible way to increase compensation while avoiding taxpayer ire. But there are limits to taxpayers’ patience (and the size of their pocketbooks), and these plans are also hitting the wall around the country.

I can’t say that I have a lot of good answers here, other than the one newer employers have been putting into practice for several decades: If you’re thinking about starting up a defined-benefit plan — think again, and don’t.

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Thursday (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

At Bloomberg Business Week, the distortion of what the Social Security system’s trustees told the public on Monday began with its headline and opening sentence.

The headline: “Social Security Fund to Run Out in ’35: Trustees.” Any reader would assume that the reference is to the situation with the retirement and disability programs combined, as both are collectively referred to as “Social Security.” Reporter Brian Faler doubled down on the headline error in his opening sentence:

(more…)

Projection.

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This column went up at PJ Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Thursday.

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On April 3, President Barack Obama delivered a speech at the annual media luncheon sponsored by the Associated Press, aka the Administration’s Press. Obama, whose proposed budget in February was so farcical that Congress rejected it unanimously in late March, bitterly criticized Wisconsin Republican Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget plan — which the House did pass but Harry Reid’s Senate has refused to consider, “despite the Senate Parliamentarian’s finding … that the law requires it” – as “thinly veiled social Darwinism.”

According to Wikipedia, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics tells us that “A ‘social Darwinist’ could just as well be a defender of laissez-faire as a defender of state socialism, just as much an imperialist as a domestic eugenist.” Historially, left-wing regimes have resorted to “survival of the fittest” social Darwinist offenses against humanity far more frequently than those on the right, especially if one classifies Nazi Germany as the predominantly leftist enterprise that it was.

In light of that history and current reality, Obama’s “social Darwinism” accusation directed at Ryan and the GOP is especially outrageous, coming from a guy whose administration has in so many ways been engaging in a slow-motion variant of it for over three years. The harm to relatively vulnerable and powerless groups arguably began with the advent of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy almost four years ago as Obama’s general election campaign shifted into high gear.

Take the job market. The most disproportionately unfit for gainful employment are those who haven’t obtained a high school diploma or its equivalent. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for those in this group who are 25 or older reached 15.9% in November 2010, and is still 12.6%:

In the 20 years the government has tracked this statistic, all 38 of the highest (i.e., worst) readings have been during each of the Obama administration’s 38 full months in office. Also note that the monthly reading for this challenging group fell to its lowest level on record in October 2006 during a Republican administration.

That’s not even the whole story. During the first quarter of 2012, this group’s seasonally adjusted average employment-population ratio of 40.2% was three points, or almost 7%, below the same ratio during fourth quarter of 2007, and has barely budged since the recession officially ended in June 2009. Oh, and because certain ethnic categories are heavily represented in the over-25 high school dropout category, the statistics just cited demonstrate yet again that the Obama economy has hit blacks and Hispanics the hardest.

The long-term unemployed are also extraordinarily vulnerable. In a normal recovery, risk-averse employers who are understandably reluctant to hire from this group end up doing so anyway as the job market tightens. The trouble is that this job market, except in certain professions, hasn’t appreciably tightened in over four years. If we added those who are sitting on the sidelines who would really like to be working but who aren’t considered part of the workforce to the current unemployment rolls, the jobless rate would be between 9.4% and 10.5% instead of the reported 8.2%.

While acknowledging that poverty as defined in the U.S. is nothing like the misery seen in so much of the rest of the world, the official poverty rate increased from 13.2% to 15.1% during Obama’s first two years to a level not seen since the early 1990s. The deterioration has been so dramatic that the Census Bureau has created a rigged contraption called the Supplemental Poverty Measurement whose purpose appears to be to create an artificial impression in future years that things are improving when they really aren’t.

Social Security is unsustainable in its current form, yet Obama has no answer other than to let it keep going and going. Social Security’s actuaries have told us that the system will be forced to permanently cut benefits by about 25% in 2036 if nothing is done. Those for whom Social Security is their only or predominant source of income would be hurt the most if that occurs. Every year the economy continues to underperform will move the benefit-reduction date closer.

Medicare and Medicaid are unsustainable in their current forms. Congress’s “solution,” ObamaCare, with its spiraling projected costs, work-demotivating and marriage-destroying subsidies, byzantine bureacracy, and individual liberty- and religion-disrespecting compulsions, would make matters far worse.

This brings us to the administration’s most fundamental “survival of the fittest” elements.

Rather than fretting over out-of-power Paul Ryan and the Republicans making decisions about who will live and who will die, the people we have to worry about are in the White House or advising it right now:

• Ezekiel (“Zeke the Bleak“) Emanuel would prefer to ration medical treatment based on the following priorities: “youngest-first, prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value.” Emanuel has also written that we should “not (be) guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia,” and that in emergency situations with scarce resources medical professionals should use a “cycle of life” priority in deciding who should get treatment, giving preference to people 13 to 40 years old (as long as they are reasonably healthy, of course).
• Science czar John Holdren co-wrote a book advocating forced abortions, mass sterilization, and a “Planetary Regime” with the power of life and death over American citizens, and has never unequivocally disavowed his attachment to these ideas.
• Barack Obama himself infamously told the daughter of an elderly woman who received a pacemaker that it would be more appropriate from here on out that people in such situations be limited to taking pain pills.

The prospect of full-fledged “social Darwinism” is far more real under a continuation of our autopilot government combined with the implementation of ObamaCare than it is under anything Ryan or Republicans have proposed.

Taking it even one step further, if you want to see social Darwinism in its rawest form, just wait until a government which runs trillion-dollar deficits until it falls off the financial cliff has to radically slash everything in sight to survive. You don’t want to think about what it will be like once everyone starts fighting over the leftovers in a country which has become largely if not mostly detached from its Judeo-Christian moral roots. If it ever comes to that, it surely won’t be Paul Ryan’s fault.

“Viral lying.”

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Note: This column went up at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Friday.

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In mid-February, during the run-up to the extension of the two percentage-point cut in the Social Security payroll tax to year’s end, the White House, using garbled language sadly not unusual for this bunch, claimed that:

Currently, 160 million Americans benefit for the tax relief that’s set to expire at the end of the month. The typical family saves about $40 with every paycheck.

Neither statement, even after grammatical correction, is anywhere close to being true. We can add both to the pile of falsehoods which will be as thick as a major metro area phone book by the time they’re all done.

A commenter at another site gave Team Obama’s penchant for quickly disseminating and perpetuating persistent fibs while fiercely resisting attempts at correction an interesting term to remember and employ: “viral lying.” The administration’s mendacity on the Social Security tax cut certainly exemplifies it. Meanwhile, establishment press lapdogs, who routinely invented alleged “lies” which weren’t lies at all during George W. Bush’s eight years, have allowed both howlers above to slide with little if any objection, missed glaring inconsistencies in messaging, and have occasionally been duped themselves.

Let’s start with the “160 million Americans” claim. There at least two problems with it:
(more…)

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Sunday (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

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UPDATE: The column is about how the Obama administration is fibbing about the reduction in the employee portion of the Social Security tax this year in two important ways:

• The claim that it “currently” benefits 160 million Americans.
• The assertion that the saving resulting from lower amounts withheld will mean that the “typical family saves about $40 with every paycheck.”

Both claims are bogus, and there’s a back of the envelope way to prove it even without getting into still-needed discussions about how often most Americans are paid (which happens to be weekly, in which case “$40 per paycheck” would only be seen by a person making $104,000 per year, which is hardly “typical”) and how many are “currently” working (only about 141.64 million per the Household Survey at the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

The quick calc is as follows: $111.9 billion dollars in estimated full-year tax savings ($93.2 billion over 10 months annualized) divided by 141.64 million workers is $790 per worker per year ($699 if you use the administration’s inflated 160 million “current” workers). Even granting Team Obama something they’re not entitled to, which is the assumption that everyone is paid once every two weeks, that’s $30.38 per paycheck ($781 divided by 26).

Don’t talk to me about two-earner households, because such households also receive two paychecks. The per-paycheck average is still $30.

By any reasonable definition, even before addressing pay frequency realities vs. the administration’s assumption, Obama is vastly exaggerating the savings workers are seeing by 32% ($40 as advertised vs. $30.38 in reality).

UPDATE 2: The Machiavellian at Virtuous Republic has also done a great takedown of the “$40 per paycheck” fib. His conclusion: “Deceptive … Purposefully.

Read the whole thing.

Here are some key paragraphs:

If the point was helping get our economy back on the road to growth and prosperity, the payroll tax holiday has been a failure.

But if the point of the payroll tax holiday is not to reduce government interference in our lives but to keep it, grow it, and strengthen the decided movement of the last three years to turn our nation into a welfare state plantation, it’s a great idea.

And that is really what is going on here and why President Obama and his Democrat colleagues on Capitol Hill love the idea.

Unlike our income taxes that government takes for general revenue and unspecified spending, the payroll tax is earmarked and specified. It pays for Social Security.

A cut in income taxes, even if not accompanied with an equivalent cut in government spending, puts the pressure for such cuts in place and carries with it the prospect of reduction of government interference in our lives.

But there is no such possibility with the payroll tax. When the tax was reduced “temporarily” last year from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent, were working Americans asked to agree to an equivalent cut in their Social Security benefits that that payroll tax pays for?

Of course not.

… Cutting payroll taxes earmarked for a Social Security system that is already bankrupt is no way to run a country and no way for people that are allegedly free and responsible citizens to live.

And using a payroll tax holiday as a back door plan to turn Social Security into a middle class welfare program does not bode well for our nation’s future.

If the point is to fix Social Security, let working Americans keep their payroll tax and use it to fund their own private retirement account – an idea that three of four Americans under fifty favor.

The “progressive” goal is to totally de-link retirement contributions from retirement benefits and lifetime income. There’s been more than enough of that already.

The explanation is crystal clear, and the occasional snide asides are hysterical:

Nicely done.

While an attempt at public-sector reform was defeated, ObamaCare suffered an epic fail.

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Note: This column went up at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Wednesday. Bolds below were added by me for today’s BizzyBlog appearance.

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So what was the bigger news out of Ohio Tuesday night:

• That Ballot Issue 2, which aimed to retain a law passed earlier this year that among other things required reasonable public-sector employee contributions towards pension and healthcare costs and limited the scope of collective bargaining, failed by 61%-39%?
• Or that Issue 3, a state constitutional amendment which set out to legally hard-wire into Ohio’s Constitution prohibitions against forcing anyone to participate in a health insurance plan or to purchase health insurance, passed by 66%-34%?

If you’re in the establishment press, the former means everything and the latter supposedly means nothing. The Associated Press, whose reporters are not so coincidentally represented by an aggressive, far-left union, is trumpeting Issue 2′s failure as one of organized labor’s “biggest victories in decades.” Decades? All of a sudden Barack Obama’s election in 2008 doesn’t count? Meanwhile, searches at the AP’s main site indicate that Issue 3 isn’t even on its national wire.

The truth is that for both Ohio and the other 49 states in the union, the Issue 3 result is potentially far more important, while in the Buckeye State itself, Issue 2′s failure doesn’t repeal the state’s growing fiscal challenges.

Issue 3 was an epic, unqualified victory for the Ohio Healthcare Freedom Alliance, the Tea Party-driven organization which orchestrated a successful petition drive and managed the fall campaign. By significant majorities in each and every one of Ohio’s 88 counties, Buckeye State residents told Washington, in the words of Chris Littleton at the Ohio Liberty Council, that:

• “… healthcare decisions should be in our hands – not the hands of politicians and bureaucrats.”
• “… mandates which compel behavior, through threat of penalties and fines, fundamentally limit personal freedom.”
• “… our rights to liberty and property … (are violated by) the federal mandate to purchase government defined health insurance.”
• “… Ohio must take a stand on freedom of choice in healthcare to protect both our state and nation moving forward.”

Majorities in every county agreed with these four assertions. The margin of Issue 3′s victory was over ten points in every county save one. It passed handily in bluer-than-blue Cuyahoga County (margin: 58-42), home of the “Little Detroit” known as Cleveland (1950 population: 915,000; 2010 population: 397,000). Issue 3 even passed in Lucas County (margin: 56-44), home of Toledo, where a conservative Republican is even harder to find than a public-sector union rep willing to give up any pay, perks, or privileges. Issue 3′s tightest margin was in Ohio University-dominated Athens County, where it still passed by over five points. At least ten suburban and rural counties racked up victories by margins of greater than 3-to-1. Additionally, do not forget that Issue 3′s gigantic rout was achieved in an off-year election where Democrats and public-sector union employees were clearly far more motivated to turn out than the rest of Ohio’s voters.

Above all, and contrary to the establishment media’s furious spin, Issue 3 was no mere “Well, whaddaya think?” exercise. It also wasn’t “largely symbolic,” as a terse, unbylined regional report from AP arrogantly claimed. Symbolize this, guys and gals in the press and throughout the USA: The Ohio Healthcare Freedom Amendment’s text is now embedded in Ohio’s Constitution. Anyone who doesn’t like that result is going to have to force it out of there. It won’t be easy, even with the help of all of Dear Leader Barack Obama’s horses and all of Eric Holder’s men and women, assuming they even hang around long enough to see such an effort through. Any federal or other attempt to undo Issue 3 is by no means assured of success, even if the Supreme Court erroneously rules that ObamaCare itself passes constitutional muster. Folks in other states who wish to protect their fundamental freedoms should seriously consider going the same route as Ohio just did.

Though it wouldn’t have changed the result, part of the blame for the size of Issue 2′s loss rests with a disjointed, unfocused campaign effort which failed to counter opponents’ non-stop stream of flat-out falsehoods. Getting outspent 3-to-1 by largely out-of-state labor interests obviously didn’t help either.

As for the real-world impact of Issue 2′s failure, Kevin O’Brien at the Cleveland Plain Dealer identified it quite succinctly a few days before the election: “Advice to low-on-the-totem-pole union members: Don’t bother celebrating. Do get your resumes in order.”

I would add: “And quickly.” That’s because while Ohioans were voting down Issue 2, they also resoundingly rejected the mother’s milk of the public sector and its unions: tax increases. In Northeast Ohio, “most (school) districts seeking additional money were turned down,” including Akron, which will “have to find a way to trim $22 million from its budget.” The song was the same in Southwest Ohio, where layoffs loom in Cincinnati and five other local school districts after levy defeats.

B-B-B-But I thought massive layoffs were going to happen if Issue 2 passed? Some layoffs might have occurred anyway, but the fact is that if the law known as “SB5″ had survived, districts would be better able to keep staff on board because of the law’s cost-sharing requirements, and would at least know that they can keep future wage increases at or below inflation. The track record of unions, especially those in the public sector, budging on any issue involving reduced pay or benefits is dismal. When faced with a choice between any kind of cut or layoffs, they have historically opted to jettison junior members — a tactic properly described as “eating their young” — even if some of those let go are outstanding workers or even teachers of the year.

The fiscal math which caused Ohio’s three largest newspapers to reluctantly support Issue 2′s passage hasn’t changed. Governor John Kasich and Ohio’s legislative majority will have to at least piecemeal some of SB5′s critical financial elements into law next year, because Ohio is not as far from becoming another disaster like Illinois as we might complacently like to believe.

Meanwhile, any time someone on the left tells you that the American people will eventually come to accept state-controlled health care, point to the Buckeye State. We – Ohio and the rest of the country — aren’t ObamaCare. That stance will prove far more relevant to 2012′s presidential election than Ohio Issue 2.

Look just a couple of hundred miles west to see the consequences (HT Newmark’s Door) of failure to deal with the fundamental matters Issue 2/SB5 addressed before Ohio’s voters rejected it:

Illinois’ state budget … is in serious meltdown mode. Less than a year after the state raised taxes by some $7 billion in the face of a fiscal crisis, legislators in Springfield, whose government qualifies as the fiscal bad-boy of states, have done little to address Illinois’ long-term spending and borrowing problems.

Even while the state’s vendors wait up to a year for money they are owed, Gov. Pat Quinn is making sure that favored insiders get paid. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether Illinois exaggerated in bond offerings the savings it claims it will get from last year’s largely cosmetic pension reforms, which did little to fix the worst state pension problem in the country. And now the governor is actually proposing the state borrow even more, up to $5 billion, to clear up some of those back bills, which prompted an editorial from the Chicago Tribune under the simple headline: “No. More. Borrowing.”

… One result of the failure to fix pensions is that the system’s costs are eating up tax revenues, including from the tax increase. The state’s annual pension contributions are up by $2 billion since 2008, while debt service from pension obligation bonds, which the state floated several times in the last decade to prop up the system, have increased by $1.14 billion, according to the Civic Federation of Chicago. In all, pension costs consume $5.8 billion, or more than 17 percent, of all Illinois general fund spending. Those costs will rise by $500 million next year and $2 billion in five years without reform.

The state has also continued to issue markers to people it owes. The Civic Federation recently estimated that Illinois’ backlog of unpaid bills financed out of its General Fund will grow to $5.5 billion this year. That state has an additional backlog of some $2.8 billion in business tax refunds and Medicaid and employee health insurance bills, for a whopping $8.3 billion in outstanding invoices.

… Once you get on a treadmill like this, you can’t get off, it seems. The state’s bonded debt has increased to $30 billion from $9.4 billion since just 2002.

If you’re wondering, the Ohio’s state retirement system’s “funded ratio,” despite a very strong year of investment performance, is less than 60% (0.60). “Depending on risk aversion and the level of sophistication assumed for the DC-scheme, minimum acceptable funding ratios are between 0.87 and 1.20.”

Comment at the original link:

You know what would be really crazy would be to bring this Chicago show to DC.

OOOhh. Thats what we did.

Yikes, we are in deep trouble.

Yup. And so is Ohio, if the state’s political class on both sides of the aisle and its public-sector unions don’t get a grip.

UPDATE: Norma at Collecting My Thoughts has more.

In his opening to Friday evening’s show:

Key mentions (mentioned in the order indicated):

… The Republican establishment doesn’t get to tell us who our nominee is — and a couple of states don’t get to tell us who our nominee is.

… Now I watched that debate yesterday, every bit.

Now Herman Cain was superb. Herman Cain should be considered seriously for President of the United States.

Rick Santorum was superb. He should be considered seriously for President of the United States.

Michelle Bachmann was superb. She should be considered seriously for President of the United States.

Newt Gingrich was superb. And he should be considered too.

As should of course should Romney and Perry, but let me tell you something.

… In Romney’s case, he keeps digging in on RomneyCare and he keeps sounding like a left-wing Democrat on Social Security.

In Perry’s case, his in-state tuition (for illegal immigrants) position, he dug in on that and it’s a position that I reject.

Levin goes on to note that those rooting for former Florida Governor Jeb Bush to enter the race should know that he supports in-state tuition rates for illegal-immigrant Floridians.

Listen to the whole thing.