[lotsofpulp]

The accounting rules were necessary to prevent understatement of liabilities, because as the previous poster wrote, today’s decision makers won’t be around when the problem happens 30 to 60 years into the future.

Employers shut them down because insuring such risks decades into the future is too costly, not to mention the inability to reliably predict events that far into the future.

[C1sc0cat]

Ah yes but are the accounting rules fit for purpose or where the accountants lent on to adjust the rules to deliberately make the alleged deficit bigger to give the employers an excuse.

If you think I am joking look at the recent audit scandals in the UK by the Big 4

[AnthonyMouse]

If anything it was historically the opposite. You had pension funds assuming guaranteed 8% returns. Compare this to actual returns on low-risk investments like treasury bills.

You could historically get close to their targets with higher risk investments (although even then they were optimistic), but that involves the risk of losing a significant amount of the principal. Which doesn't mesh with providing a guaranteed payout to retirees. But if you stick to lower risk investments, the amount of the shortfall is enormous.

So it was historically fraud. They guaranteed a payout and then did things that may have resulted in them not having the money. Once you do the accounting accurately and restrict yourself to investments that can't result in being unable to make the promised payouts, it turns out the cost of a guaranteed payout is large.

[C1sc0cat]

Why do you take what the accounting "profession" and employers /politicians at 100% face value - you don't see they may have an agenda here.

and you are ignoring the fact that DB schemes are immortal or very very long lived.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Why do you take what the accounting "profession" and employers /politicians at 100% face value - you don't see they may have an agenda here.

You don't have to trust them at all, you can do the math for yourself.

> and you are ignoring the fact that DB schemes are immortal or very very long lived.

That's the fraud. Nothing actually lasts forever. When you use today's payments to pay yesterday's benefits, you have nothing to pay what you owe to today's workers. If the company's business ever fails, the workers lose their retirement because the money they paid in was already paid out to their predecessors.

On top of that, companies with huge unfunded pension liabilities have a competitive disadvantage against newer companies without them, which makes it more likely those companies will fail.

And the same is true of governments. A state that promises retirees half its GDP is going to have low economic growth, low population growth because young people can't afford to start a family there, and reduced immigration because people won't want to to move to a place where they pay half their income in taxes to fund a retirement program that will be bankrupt by the time it's their turn to collect it.

[lotsofpulp]

My taxes going up because the government is severely underfunded and is sending 1 out of every 3 dollars to pay for labor from 30 years ago instead of funding schools, infrastructure, and quality of life for my kids.

It’s pretty well established that if you give a small group of people control of a large pot of money and the ability to fudge numbers decades into the future, it’s going to be corrupted and the future is going to end up paying.