Gotham Going Greek

by JASmius

As America's First City goes, so goes America:

New York City's retirement plan for municipal workers is growing more underfunded despite increases in the share of the city's budget to pensions.

And the city's new mayor, Bill de Blasio, is devoting little focus to the issue, the New York Times reports.

From 1999 to 2012, the pension plan for general city workers plunged to 63% funded from 136%. Meanwhile, New York City is set to devote $8 billion next year to all municipal workers' pensions, up more than 1,100% from 2000.

The pension spending now represents 11% of the city budget, up from less than 2% 14 years ago.

"They're never going to catch up," Sean McShea, president of Ryan Labs, an asset management firm that works for pension funds among others, tells the Times.

The city's pension system suffers from the same woes as other cities and states: hefty promises made to workers, the unwillingness of city officials to face up to the problem for years and overly optimistic assumptions for market returns.

So very, very illustrative it is.  A polity is under competent, benevolent governance; greedy, dishonorable, mobbish rabble-rousers defame and depose and replace it with thuggish thieves who divide and electorally conquer, overpromising plunder from the demonized "Other"; the new governance squanders the fruits of its competent, benevolent predecessors; and the corrupted hoi palloi elect more of the same.  And when the proverbial fiscal "walls come tumbling down," whom will they blame for the calamity?

Are you kidding?:

As for the problems nationwide, "without some way to amend the terms of retirement plans, states and municipalities . . . face years of increasing costs and pressure on budgets that inevitably mean higher taxes and fewer services—in other words, the worst of both worlds," Steven Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes in the City Journal, an urban affairs magazine published by the institute.

A swarm of microcosms adds up to a de facto macrocosm.  One whose lazy, greedy denizens will inevitably demand financial succor from the federal government.  The same federal government that is already on the hook for $210 TRILLON of its own unfunded liabilities that will never be made good on, either.  And when the mass realization of this reality dawns, the brutal social implosion, the fiery, spontaneous insurrection, the second Civil War that erupts will be....

Never mind.  Suffice it to say, the chaos in Greece a few years ago after its own fiscal collapse resembles a Coca-Cola commercial circa 1971 compared to what's to come here.



Or we'll all just slowly starve to death in grinding, inescapable poverty, under a brutal Islamo-communist regime that has brainwashed what's left of the populace into believing that slavery is prosperity and liberty.  And that Dystopianism is "cool".

Gothamites better find Bruce Wayne to plunder, and soon.

Too bad Bane is dead, huh?