Free Republic

California's fiscal pickle – state and local budgets that are many billions of dollars out of balance – may have just gotten worse by hundreds of billions of dollars. The Governmental Accounting Standards Board has dropped a bombshell with preliminary new rules that, if adopted, would force governments to increase projections of pension liabilities by using tighter "discount rates" – effectively, lower assumptions of pension fund earnings. The huge California Public Employees' Retirement System, the California State Teachers' Retirement System, the University of California Retirement System and dozens of locally managed pension funds would no longer be able to minimize...

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is delaying release of the annual report on the financial health of Social Security and Medicare so that the new report can reflect the impact of the recently passed health care overhaul. An administration official told The Associated Press that this year's trustees report will be delayed until June 30, three months later than it usually comes out. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity before the formal announcement, said that the delay will allow the government to determine the impact of the massive overhaul of health care that President Barack Obama just signed...

New online program can replace trip to a field office WASHINGTON — The Social Security Administration, envisioning the near-future prospect of 10,000 baby boomers applying for benefits every day, has put together a new online service that will allow people to get their benefits without ever traveling to a Social Security field office. The agency, in introducing the program Tuesday, said most people will be able to apply for their retirement or disability benefits in 15 minutes or less.

Barring some cataclysmic natural disaster or terrorist act, the biggest crisis of the next few years on the local and state government front is likely to be the fallout from new accounting rules ordered by an obscure agency, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB). They mandate that public agencies calculate and reveal their long-term unfunded liabilities for pension and health-care benefits owed to retired employees. When these reports are finally released, they will amount to a day of reckoning for literally thousands of school districts, cities, counties and dozens of states that have recklessly bestowed unfunded lifetime benefits on public...

SAN FRANCISCO - The bill is coming due for years of generous benefits bestowed upon state, county, city and school employees, and it's a stunner: hundreds of billions of dollars over the next three decades, threatening some local governments with bankruptcy and all but guaranteeing cuts in education, public safety and other services. This staggering burden is coming to light because of new rules issued by the Government Accounting Standards Board. They require public agencies to disclose the future cost of health care and other benefits - such as dental, vision and life insurance - promised in addition to traditional...

BrookesNews.Com Headline: United Airlines says it can't pay $9.8 Billion in Pensions. Yet they have an infinitesimal problem compared to the Congress of the United States. Congress has an unfunded $11 Trillion Social Security "pension" they haven't either put in the bank or recorded on the people's books. The pilots and stewardesses think they have a problem. Wow, they have no idea what a problem really is. Yet our MSM, the Democrats, the liberal elite, Democrat Congressmen all proclaim "Hey, no problem, No hurry, we can obstruct Republicans" until the unrecorded liability is $25 Trillion (and we have to cancel...