W.C. Varones

Despite CalPERS, like most government pension plans, being vastly underfunded, they're actually still paying out more money to beneficiaries than they're taking in as contributions from municipal employees and employers.

CalPERS 2016-17 financial report:


Look at the numbers circled in green. That's what they're putting into investments. The numbers circled in red are what they're taking out each year.

The green numbers were even lower in recent years. CalPERS has been putting far less into the market than it's been taking out every year. They're belatedly starting to increase contributions, and the net contributions (green minus red) should turn positive fairly soon.

To the extent CalPERS is representative of public pensions overall (and it generally is), turning from net seller to net buyer will be a tailwind for stocks. And should stocks decline over a few years, it makes pensions even more underfunded and thus requires them to buy even more. Call it the Cal…

ABC News:
Dart then instituted a program that rewarded "serial masturbators" with pizza if they went 30 days without a sexual assault or masturbating incident, according to the lawsuit.

Since detainees who had never exposed themselves were not eligible to receive pizza as a reward, the program had a reverse effect, leading to an "increase in exposure incidents" since the detainees without prior incidents "were now incentivized to commit indecent exposure and masturbation in order to qualify for a pizza reward," court documents state. HT: Charlie McDanger

The Congressional Budget Office regularly posts 10-year budget outlooks.

Here is the most recent:


It shows a deficit of 3.6% of GDP in 2017, 2.8% of GDP in 2018, and worsening to 5.2% of GDP by 2027. But that projection was from June 2017, long before the Trump tax cuts or the Omnibus which busted the spending caps.

Outside analysts are now projecting deficits well over a trillion dollars in 2019, or more than 5% of GDP. So what does the CBO say? They don't say.

You can see that over the last several years, the CBO has updated its projections 2 or 3 times per year. But now, with the massive tax cuts and budget-busting Omnibus, suddenly the CBO goes radio silent for 9 months!



Is the fiscal trajectory simply too horrifying for publication?

UPDATE: Whoomp! There it is!

Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign based on a pee pee porn novella commissioned by the Hillary campaign?

WSJ Daily Shot:
The US federal government deficit is moving in the wrong direction. Here is an updated fiscal balance as a percentage of the GDP



A trend which is even scarier than the rising budget deficit is that increasingly Americans just don’t care. For the first time in years, the majority of Americans didn’t list the deficit as a ‘top priority’ issue.


Americans care about what the mainstream media tell them to care about. When the media stop covering the deficit, the sheeple stop thinking about it.