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March 15, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
22:53
The coming financial collapse of PENSION programs across America
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It's funny when the mainstream media finally gets around to covering things that I've been talking about for years.
This happens all the time and recently I saw an article about how the pension programs across America are, well, $3.4 trillion short.
Oops, they don't have the money.
That has been promised to the retirees.
And this is true across cities and states.
And the shortfall is so huge that these municipalities and governments are now starting to really come up with a strategy of how they're going to survive this.
And the strategy will blow your mind.
It will shock you.
Here's their strategy.
They know they're broke.
They know they can't fix this by raising taxes or raising contributions to the pensions.
They can't fix this by just cutting the pension payouts without starting massive riots and revolts.
So the way they're going to fix this is they're going to become too big to fail.
And they're going to wait for a federal bailout.
That's their plan.
Whether we're talking about the city of Los Angeles or the city of Chicago, for that matter, and many dozens of other large cities across America, their plan, literally, is to fudge the numbers for a while until the situation gets so bad and they're so bankrupt that they announce they're too big to fail and they demand that the federal government, i.e.
the taxpayers, Bail out their bankrupt pension plans in order to avoid having to default on the pension payouts to all their retirees.
And the shortfall, again, is $3.4 trillion.
Not billion with a B, no, trillion.
So a couple of thoughts on this.
Number one, I've been warning about this for a very long time.
Warning you and everybody...
That the pensions are going into default.
And it's a big question of whether the federal government will even be in a position at that point to be able to bail out these too-big-to-fail pension plans, even if they want to.
It's no guarantee.
Secondly, most of these pension plans that I'm talking about here are pensions for government workers.
People who were, you know, firefighters or police officers or government office workers.
They worked for the county.
They worked for the state.
They processed paperwork or they ran programs or grants or what have you.
People who, for the most part, just tried to put in an honest day's work and earn an honest living and build up an honest pension.
And they thought...
That government was going to be a good choice for that.
Oh, and school teachers, of course.
Can't leave out the school teachers.
Lots and lots of teachers who are just routinely getting screwed by the system, by the way.
These people were doing, you know, honest work to make an honest living and an honest retirement, and now they're starting to realize that the entire system is rigged against them and that essentially the money that they are counting on does not exist.
It doesn't exist even right now.
It's not there.
And the outcome of this is going to be catastrophic for these people.
It brings to mind a very important point here, which is maybe working for a corrupt government is not the best idea.
Because government is incessantly corrupt and dishonest, and especially when it comes to numbers and finance, there is no such thing as honest government.
Government always lies about numbers.
The federal government today lies about unemployment, lies about the national debt, lies about The stock market viability and lies about what it's going to do with interest rates via the central banks.
When it comes to numbers, there is no number the federal government publishes that has anything to do with the economy that is genuine or accurate.
Every number is fudged for political reasons to cover up the failures of government.
And that's what the pension plan really is.
Government pensions, even at the state level, are really governments making promises they can't keep.
And if you really think about it, that's the business that government is in.
Every politician that runs for office is standing there in front of the TV cameras doing what?
Making promises that they can't keep.
Oh, we're gonna give you free healthcare or affordable healthcare.
Yeah, we're gonna give you subsidies.
We're gonna create job opportunities.
Life is gonna be good.
It's all lies, of course, because what they're actually going to do is they're gonna confiscate your money through coercion.
They're gonna make life difficult for you.
They're gonna put you out of business if you're a small business.
They're gonna get you fired if you're an employee.
They're going to make your life a living hell.
That is what they do because all they can do is make promises that they cannot keep.
And so a pension is just one more big financial promise that government can't keep.
That's all a pension is.
A promise, an IOU, to pay you a certain amount per month after you retire immediately.
In exchange for all the years of service that you gave the government, but they can't keep that promise.
That promise is already financially broken.
Even right now at this point, it is financially broken.
It just hasn't yet hit the point of total collapse yet in terms of payouts versus income.
But inside the systems, and this is what's being discovered now by the mainstream media, there is a $3.4 trillion shortfall.
So let's get to some practical matters.
What does this mean in terms of you and what you need to do?
If you are relying on a government pension for your retirement, you'd be wise to realize right now that that pension may not be there for you.
And I know that might be a devastating thought, and you might think that you can't survive without that pension check.
Perhaps, from today's point of view, you're correct.
You need to seriously think about how to survive without that money, how to get perhaps some other source of income, or how to reduce your cost of living.
Through those methods, you can genuinely and realistically lower your cost of living and perhaps be able to survive In an environment where your pension fund collapses and you don't get those payouts.
Again, I know this is a difficult thought.
Maybe I shouldn't even mention this next thought, but there's also an issue of, is the dollar even going to be worth anything?
Is the currency going to be worth anything?
Are your savings going to be worth anything?
For all of us, that's a big question.
It's not just the pensions.
It's the entire banking system.
If you put money in the stock market, is that going to be worth anything?
And really, if you start to consider all of these systemic risks that exist in the system, if you're intelligent, you eventually have to realize that you need some real assets to As a backup to protect yourself from these risks that the pension programs, for example, have all bet on the market going up forever and the economy growing forever and the contributions to the pension fund expanding forever.
And these assumptions of forever are false.
They don't work.
They aren't based in reality.
And that's why the pension funds are all broke, because the contributions Have not been sufficient to cover the outlays that are required by the pension funds.
So they've been based in unrealistic fantasy land expectations.
Basically, delusional thinking on the part of bureaucrats.
And gee, we've never heard that before.
Bureaucrats being delusional when it comes to finance?
No!
Say it isn't so, Sam!
But, of course, we can rely on them to always behave in a way that's delusional when it comes to numbers.
So if your retirement check is coming from those delusional bureaucrats who lie about numbers, then you might as well write that off right now.
And you need some real assets instead.
Well, what's real?
Well, gold obviously is real, but gold can always be exchanged for money.
Even throughout all of history, gold has been, it's had value and it holds its value because they can't just keep creating more gold out of nothing.
That's what's interesting.
You see, they can create fiat currency They can print more dollars, but they can't print more gold.
And so gold holds its value.
It's precisely why it holds its value, because of its scarcity and the difficulty of mining gold and the reality that you can't transmute lead to gold.
If gold could be manufactured, it would be worthless.
It can't be made.
It can only be found and mined and concentrated.
That's it.
So gold is one thing.
Land is also worth some real value.
Especially land that has good soil on it for producing food or land that has a water source or multiple water sources.
They're going to be extremely valuable in the near future.
As money loses its value, real assets gain in value.
And if there is a way, by the way, for you to cash out Your pension, actually, let me introduce this as a whole different section.
All right, new section, action items.
That's how I should have introduced this.
Can you cash out your pension with a penalty and take that money and put it into something real?
Can you do that?
Some pensions allow this type of transaction to take place.
Not all pensions, but some.
And if you are able to do this, you normally would pay a huge penalty and you'd have to pay taxes on what you took out of the pension.
And it seems like a punitive type of move to do that.
But I am here telling you right now that if your pension program supports that as a possible maneuver, You should look into it with the help of a qualified financial advisor who understands the risks that I'm describing here, the risk of systemic collapse, the risk of your pension being worthless.
Now suppose that you can take your money out and experience a 30% penalty or even a 50% penalty.
Let's just call it 50% for argument's sake.
Wouldn't it be better to get 50 cents on the dollar today rather than get zero five years or ten years from now when the whole thing collapses?
The shortfall is $3.4 trillion.
It is a mathematical fact that most people who have these pensions owed to them are not going to get paid.
It's a certainty.
So if you can get 50 cents on the dollar right now, And then put that into something that's real, that can't be taken away from you, that can't be confiscated, that can't lose its value overnight.
That seems like a very wise decision to me.
Of course, you've got to make your own decisions.
I can't tell you what to do.
Maybe you get lucky and your pension doesn't fail.
I guess that's always a possibility.
Maybe through some miracle of economics, The state that you worked for manages to come up with money from nothing so they can keep paying their pensions.
But I wouldn't bet my life on that.
I wouldn't bet on that.
Not a chance.
Odds are, if you're living on a pension or planning to retire on a pension, at some point, that pension payout is going to be either drastically reduced or halted altogether.
And given those mathematically valid risks, you would be wise to look at alternatives that could protect the money that you have owed to you.
So if you can cash out of a pension program, that's something to look into.
But if you're going to do it, you've got to do it before everybody else gets the same idea because Obviously, when it all starts to hit the fan, everybody will be trying to cash out all at once, and it'll essentially be kind of like a run on the bank.
It'll be a run on the pension program, and that will cause it to go into default all by itself.
So, when you understand that, you also understand, by extension, through logic and rational thinking and mathematics, that only a very small percentage of people can actually get out of the system.
And this is true in any kind of a bubble where IOUs exceed the actual assets that have to be paid out.
So in any bubble, including a stock market bubble, or a derivatives bubble, or a subprime loan bubble, or a pension program bubble, which is really what we have right now, an IOU kind of bubble, in any bubble there's only a very small percentage of people who can get out in time.
Because by the very nature of mathematics, as the masses begin to cash in or cash out, as the case may be, the system collapses.
It's kind of like a...
Well, a Ponzi scheme actually is the perfect, the most accurate description of this.
Think about it.
A pension is a Ponzi scheme.
Now let's back up for a second.
I should say an underfunded pension is a Ponzi scheme.
A Ponzi scheme is an investment scam where...
The number of new people paying into the system must increase constantly in order to continue to allow a small minority of people to cash out.
It's dependent on finding an ever larger group of suckers to contribute to the system, while everybody thinks they're earning big dollars and big returns.
In reality, The Ponzi scheme is not earning anything.
It's just recycling money from the new people who are coming in and paying out a portion to the old people cashing out.
While creating the illusion that wealth is being created.
And of course, Bernie Madoff, I almost said Bernie Sanders, but Bernie Madoff, I guess Bernie Sanders would be running like a totally different kind of Ponzi scheme called taxation and entitlement programs.
But Bernie Madoff ran the big Ponzi scheme, the investment banking Ponzi scheme.
He was the head of NASDAQ. At one point, and he ran the largest Ponzi scheme ever recorded in the history of human finance.
And he did it in the same way that your pension program is probably being operated.
A pension program needs more and more suckers, victims, to pay into the system.
That's called your pension contribution.
And maybe your employer pays part of that for you or all of it for you, but One way or another, you're putting in the hours in order to generate that financial input into the system.
And then the IOUs that the pension promises to pay out really can't be covered because it's making promises it can't keep.
So it has to keep finding larger and larger numbers of suckers to pay into the system in order to meet the payouts that it's making to those who have already retired.
Now this, because it is a Ponzi scheme, All Ponzi schemes mathematically eventually collapse without exception.
It's only a matter of time.
So the pension Ponzi's will collapse as well.
And if you can do math, then you understand that this is the case.
Hopefully you've come to grips with this.
You've recognized this as being reality and you're starting to make plans to survive it or to have alternative sources of income or reduce your cost of living and so on.
I'm going to wrap this up here, but I understand these are harsh realities for many people to face.
And believe me, I don't win any friends by telling people the truth.
Most people prefer to live in their delusional fairytale lands where they imagine that all the IOUs are always going to be good.
This is the same mindset of people who were victimized by Bernie Madoff.
They were living in a fairytale la-la land of thinking, yeah, we're making 12% to 15% returns year after year after year on all these investments.
This guy's a genius.
This guy, Bernie Madoff, he's an absolute financial master.
And he's been returning all this money.
And all the best people in New York are using him.
And he's very well known in the Jewish community too.
And he's a smart Jew who's making us all money hand over fist.
The guy's awesome!
And then they all got screwed because the whole thing collapsed.
And they got, I don't know, two cents on the dollar or something like that.
Some of them were just completely wiped out.
There is a cost...
For living under delusions.
And yet, most people, when it comes down to it, choose the delusion day to day because that delusion feels more comfortable to them and it is too psychologically difficult to face the reality outside that delusion.
For you and your life, wherever you are financially and with your retirement or pension IOUs, I encourage you to live in reality and not suffer under the delusion that will ultimately wipe out many people.
There will be people who are made homeless by the pension wipeouts that are coming.
Literally homeless.
They will lose everything.
Because they're living on the edge right now financially and when that pension breaks down and they don't get that pension money, it's over for them financially.
They have no option.
Don't be that person.
If you count on the system failing now, then you're ahead of the curve and you can avoid being victimized by it like the Bernie Madoff victims.
I hope this has been helpful.
I do promise you I'm never going to lie to you.
I'm never going to paint some artificial rosy picture for you.
I'm always going to tell it like it is.
And as those of you who have followed my work for many, many years, 15 or more years, know...
I'm almost always eventually correct on these matters.
It's just a matter of time before the rest of society wakes up to the things that I'm talking about.
So now the mainstream media is covering the pension shortfall.
And that's a sign that it's getting closer.
You still have time to take action.
These pensions are not going to collapse overnight, but over the next several years and in some cases a couple of decades for certain pensions.
But this is the time to be thinking about this.
Because there could be catalyzing events that actually accelerate that timetable.
There could be systemic economic collapses that do collapse the pensions virtually overnight.
Events like what happened or almost happened in 2008 with the Too Big to Fail investment banking bailouts.
And then in 1997, another Too Big to Fail event with long-term capital management almost failing.
These events are going to happen again and It's not guaranteed that the bailouts will be able to work every single time.
So you may have some time, but don't get too complacent with this.
Don't be someone who finds yourself without your pension payments and with nothing to show for it.
Not a good situation.
So thanks for listening.
Again, this is Mike Adams, The Health Ranger.
Check out my websites, collapse.news, bugout.news, newstarget.com.
And also check out my new book.
It's called Food Forensics.
You can find it and even download the first section absolutely free at foodforensics.com.
The book is also available for sale on Amazon.com and Barnes& Noble.
And it will be released in bookstores July 26th of 2016.
And you're going to find that to be just as fascinating about food as this whole talk here has been about finance.
Thanks for listening.
Take care.
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