Chickens come home to roost?

This quote has gotten a lot of media attention lately. It has been blasted across multiple media formats - radio, television, print and internet in reference to a sermon given by Senator Obama's former pastor.

A new connotation for this quote may be the pending pension and health care fund short falls that are going to hit home and become extremely relevant in the next few years. Many of these funds have used unique accounting methods to balance the deficits created by poor investment performance.

Those accounting methods will all be irrelevant when our parents, friends and mentors don't have the money that they need to live on. They won't have the money that has been promised to them. What do we do then?

Many of these under performing plans and funds were launched during our US "socialist era". After the New Deal and WWII our society changed drastically. Everyone felt that we had to take care of each other on a national level. This was new because until this point most care was local - communities helping their own. These global changes institutionalized care and support and made it national. These changes brought on social security, organized health benefits, and public and private pension funds. This all worked great until the late 1970s. That's when the bloom started to come off of the rose.

In the late 1970s the Great Society, as envisioned by LBJ started to collapse. Industries started to falter (railroad industry and steel industry for example) and people found that their safety nets had holes in it. Unfortunately, these holes were large enough for entire communities to fall through.

This is happening again, except this time it will be much worse. Pension funds may find that they are trillions (not billions) of dollars short of their obligations. This will impact public funds for our retiring teachers, policemen, firemen and other long term public servants. Think Enron without the corporate structure.

Some health care benefits are already experiencing this. Need more proof - look at the benefit plans and funds of many unionized organizations. Teachers, plumbers, police, nurses - just about everybody but our national politicians may well be caught with a short check and a long bill.

People are living longer, healthier, more active lives. They are retiring earlier. So the next time that you hear, "...the chickens have come home to roost..." don't think about terrorism or war or the racial divide. Instead go to your mail and check your pension plan. Then check on their actuarial obligations. You do the math is there enough for all or will something have to change.