Social Issues

While we've yet to experience any large municipal pension failures, which is just a matter of 'when' rather than 'if', the small pension failures sprinkled across the state of California are starting to pile up.  As The Sacremento Bee points out today, public workers in Trinity and Imperial counties are just the latest to have their pensions slashed by up to 90% as their cities admit what most of us have known for some time, namely that they're running ponzi schemes which simply don't have the funding required to payout the benefits they've promised. 

Robbie Travers, a 21-year-old law student, is being investigated by the University of Edinburgh for claims he committed a “hate crime”.

As we detailed previoustly, sharing a comment on his Facebook page – in response to the U.S. Air Force dropping a massive ordinance air blast (or MOAB, “Mother Of All Bombs) on a network of ISIS tunnels in Afghanistan in April – Travers said:

Authored by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,

Public pensions are a financial time bomb... and I see two ways to profit from the explosion.

In the US, unfunded public pension liabilities have surpassed $5 trillion. And that’s during an epic stock and bond market bubble.

Predictably, the government’s go-to “solution” is already making matters worse.

At first, distressed states simply increase taxes.

We've frequently argued that public pension underfundings are perhaps the greatest threat to the long-term economic outlook of the United States, if not the globe.  With aggregate underfunding levels of $5-$8 trillion, depending on what discount rate your local politicians decide to pull out of thin air, the forthcoming pension crisis will be too large for even the very generous American taxpayer to cover.

According to a new report, one third of U.S. adults are obese along with one in six children.

The research was conducted by the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and, as Statista's Nial McCarthy explains, it found that the adult obesity rate exceeded 35 percent in five states, 30 percent in 25 states and 25 percent in 46 states.