Free Republic

The Unemployment Insurance (UI) trust fund the California Employment Development Department uses to pay benefits is now “structurally insolvent” a new Legislative Analyst’s Office report states. The report – a reaction to the “May Fund Forecast” released by the EDD last week states quite bluntly that the “temporary” – now about 15 years and not the six or seven years the EDD originally projected – federal surcharge will be used to cover on-going bills before actually paying the $18 billion-dollar federal debt the agency incurred due to gross incompetence during the pandemic.

People wonder how government could ignore problems like those that led to the Minneapolis bridge collapse, but the truth is that officials have long been turning a blind eye to many looming disasters besides the nation’s roughly 75,000 structurally deficient highway spans. Consider our Social Security system. Each year, the nonpartisan Social Security Trustees details the program’s sorry financial prospects. The latest report concluded that the program — which consumes more than one-fifth of the total budget — will begin paying out more in benefits than it takes in as taxes in just 10 years. At that time, Social Security...

LOS ANGELES California motorists make millions of daily crossings of bridges and overpasses classified as "structurally deficient" like the span that collapsed in Minneapolis, but state transportation officials say none are in danger of falling down. Of the 50 most heavily trafficked bridges and overpasses deemed structurally deficient in the United States, 38 are in populous Southern California, according to an Associated Press analysis of data from the Federal Highway Administration. Of those, 32 are in Los Angeles County, five in Orange County and one in Riverside County. Bridges with the designation in Essex and Hunterdon counties in New Jersey...