‘Hi, This Is Michelle Obama…’

Going Broke ‘Hi, this is Michelle Obama…’
You hear the most amazing things on the streets of Baltimore. On Election Day, a loudspeaker mounted on a white van makes its way up and down the streets with a recorded message.
As near as we could make out, Mrs. Obama was urging grown-ups to vote. As they say on Wall Street, she was ‘talking her book.’ The political elite needs the voting masses like a tractor-trailer needs diesel fuel – to get where it is going.
In the Wall Street Journal last week our spirits were buoyed when we realized that we had more life left than we thought. New figures show a man who reaches age 65 will likely live to be 86.6 years old – a full two years more than the last forecast.
Two more years? What will we do with them? Run for public office? Learn a foreign language? Rob a liquor store and serve 24 months in jail? Wait. There must be a cloud to go with this silver lining. ‘The new estimates […] could eventually increase retirement liabilities by roughly 7%,’ says the Journal.
The last time we looked, the US was already so far underwater it was almost sure to get the bends. According to GAAP accounting, Washington owes about $212 trillion – most of it in money it doesn’t have – to pay pensions and health care benefits.
If people are living longer, those liabilities must increase. Let’s see, 7% of $212 trillion… Hmmm… You can do the math as well as we can. The new total should be about $15 trillion more. And if that is so, what does it mean for government pension and health care systems throughout the developed world?
What it means is that they are all going broke. Led by those aging pacesetters: the Japanese. Yes, in the race to see which modern, debt-funded social welfare state will go broke first, Japan is in the lead.

Projected cost of social security benefits, Japan

This post was published at Acting-Man on November 5, 2014.