Federal insurance programs failing

Congress Urged to Act Soon on Union Pension Funding Crisis

While RESA was the main focus throughout the hearing, other topics beyond that particular piece of legislation repeatedly came up and underscored some of the other areas where Senators said they soon hope to make progress. For example, during her questioning of the experts, Michigan’s Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow stepped back from RESA to urge the Committee to find some real urgency on the multiemployer union pension crisis. Senator Mike Enzi, R-Wyoming, agreed, noting that 150 such plans could become insolvent within a matter of years.
“We need a hair on fire moment about the union pension issue,” Stabenow said. “In my lifetime, I cannot believe that we are seeing folks who have lost or will lose a pension benefit they have paid for over decades. This is a whole generation of union workers who are in danger of not receiving the benefits which they have been promised, and which they have paid for.”
Anyone who has listened in on the various public meetings held by the Joint Select Committee on the Solvency of Multiemployer Pension Plans will have noticed the dire testimony given time and again by various stakeholders in the multiemployer pension space. In previous testimony on this matter and in comments made this week, witnesses suggested that less than 1% of multiemployer plans are 100% funded when using reasonable actuarial assumptions. Others noted that, just 10 years ago, the generally agreed upon figure was that multiemployer pension plans as a whole carried a funding gap of about $200 billion. Today, it is more like a $680 billion shortfall, and growing.

This is another 'split the pie' between millennials and boomers. 

In due course, politicians made promises they cannot keep causing the program to get stale and bleed. Now add this cost to teachers, Something for All, infrastructure; all of which are up for spending.  My count says Congress needs another 400 billion in debt per year, an impossibility.