Over the years, Natural News founder/editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, has been spot-on when it comes to predicting major political events, social trends, financial shifts and other yet-to-happen occurrences.
He did so again just recently when, in an April podcast, he predicted big changes to the pension system for the City of Dallas – namely, that city officials would freeze benefits.
In the video podcast, located here, Adams exposed the general collapse of pension programs across America. Information in the podcast includes:
* Pension programs across America are under-funded by $3.4 trillion.
* The strategy for pension programs is to cook the books and then, when they can no longer cover up the financial facts, claim to be “too big to fail” and demand a bailout.
* Pensions all across America are going into default. How many pension plans can the federal government bail out?
* Most of these pensions provide monthly retirement incomes to former government workers.
* The government repeatedly LIES to you about all economic numbers and debt numbers.
* Government is in the business of making promises they can’t keep! This includes pension promises.
* If you are relying on a government pension for your retirement, you may need to rethink how reliable that is.
* Consider ways to increase your income or lower your cost of living.
* How much is your pension worth if the dollar collapses?
* You need some real assets as a backup.
* What’s real? Gold, silver, land, ammo … .
* Can you cash out your pension and invest it in something that’s real?
* It is a mathematical fact that most people who are owed pension money will never receive it.
* Only a few will be able to ever collect what they are owed; an underfunded pension is a Ponzi scheme.
* All Ponzi schemes collapse. It is a mathematical certainty.
* Count on the system failing now, and you may avoid being victimized by it.
Adams nailed it. In recent days, SHTF Plan reported that Dallas had suspended withdrawals from its city fire and police pension systems, after the city’s mayor, Mike Rawlings, filed suit against the two of them. He referred to the withdrawals as a “run on the bank” of an “insolvent” pension system that is in “financial crisis.” The delayed action came only after $500 million in deposits had been withdrawn since August.
The Dallas Morning News reported further that the pensions board of trustees blocked further withdrawals with $154 million in outstanding requests still unfulfilled.
The problem? The funds are hundreds of millions in debt, and thus unable to pay out the promised amount of benefits to retirees.
“Our situation is currently critical, and we took action,” board chairman Sam Friar said.
The problem is that politicians and city officials’ schemes to pay generous benefits to fire and police retirees did not have sustainable revenue models. In other words, despite contributions by currently employed and working firefighters and police officers, the pension funds were not bringing in enough revenue to remain sustainable.
And it’s only going to get worse. As Adams notes, pension funds all around the country are underfunded to the tune of trillions of dollars. And any political effort to change promised payout amounts is usually met with court action and, often, pension systems are upheld as is, despite the fact that they are going bankrupt.
One “idea” thus far has been to approach the federal government (taxpayers, in other words) to bail out pension plans that were over-promised by state and local officials. It’s not clear where the incoming Trump administration stands on this issue, but others rightfully believe that bailing out financially bleeding local pension funds is a matter for local/state governments.
That may seem unfair to state and local taxpayers, but they can extract their vengeance by replacing local elected leaders.
Hear Adams’ full prescient podcast here.
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