There is a good reason state pensions cannot last. They assume a 8% growth rate of their funds. If you understand compounding, you understand that is mathematicly impossible.
Because stupid people do stupid stuff. Probably to do with greed or something. Placate the masses with ponzi's while earning yourself a nice salary for giving people 8% pensions, and get out before SHTF.
Dunno. Gated communities. Pacific Islands. Maybe they actually believe in their crap, like a religion. people tend to avoid short-term pain, even if the pain will still be given on longer term, and even if that longer term pain is greater by a multiplier because you didnt take the short-term pain.
Something I noticed is that because the economic ballshit didn't collapse for such a long time due to getting into debt the economists actually began to believe their own ballshit.
I think it works like this. If we assume an 8% return the corps can underfund pensions. Now the gov't can let accounting assume 7-6-5-% rate of return to fund a pension and everything is honky dory. But the kicker is, these assumptions never work out.(I think there are links on the net proving these returns on pension). Now if we underfund pensions, Profits are up (oil cos are a good example) then the pols can say wooo, oil profits are up lets tax the bastards, in the meantime oil cos live with unfunded medical and pension shortfalls big time. Big frigging game.
Those are very good points. It's really just all borrowing from the future and then postpoing that day of reckoning until tomorrow, next week, next year, etc, etc... The problem is that we have a bunch of pollyana's around these parts that actually believe that unlimited Quant Easing will actually "fix the math"; they simply refuse to acknowledge that it's nothing more than a means to postpone the day of reckoning.