I admit the guy is a bit odd and his web site is not the greatest, but it takes an oddball who is good with numbers to expose this kind of thing, IF WHAT HE SAYS IS TRUE. Thats why I asked originally in GQ!
And I will find the part of the video where he shows where the assets are. The CAFR is a different statement from the regular budget report and they are listed on the CAFR.
Are the assets stuck behind someone’s couch cushions? This is likely about as plausible as anything this video guy can come up with.
Here’s the 2008 US financial report, in PDF. Microsoft isn’t listed as a federal holding.
Reading what he’s saying more closely, he’s saying that government pension funds own large portions of stock in companies like Microsoft, Disney, Time Warner, Exxon, and so on. That’s undoubtedly true. Government pension funds can be enormous, and I’m pretty sure that CalPERS, the California pension fund, is the largest pension fund in the country, and big companies scramble to get government pension fund investors.
But that money can’t really be liquidated. The funds are paid into by government employees, and the revenues are used to pay for the employees health care and retirement plans. If California were to raid the pension fund to pay off its debts, that would be a massive betrayal of all the California government workers who paid into it.
Going broke is such a weird term. I mean, it could mean that for the future Baby Boomer generation to collect on their “savings” they would have to rely on workers presently working “paying out their savings” in order to do so.
Boomer “Ok, give me my money, I’m retired!”
Government “we aren’t broke but one second, let me collect from this 20 yr old first”
Now, I don’t call that going broke but some might…
Or, to put it another way, there’s a massive cover up going on right now: the government is just sitting on the most valuable real estate in the country. The value of this property is phenomenal – it simply can’t be calculated because it is worth so much money. But all you have to do is look at government reports and see that this land could be worth literally trillions of dollars. Meanwhile, your taxes are going up and they’re shipping our jobs to China!
All we have to do is return this land to the people and we will be able to pay off our budget deficit and a good size of the national debt.
We just need to sell off the White House, the Capitol, Yellowstone, the Statue of Liberty, etc.
I repeat again: it is a total crackpot BS idea and there is no substance to what the guy is saying.
Huh? That’s how SS always worked. There are no savings (quoted or not), the money collected from current earners is paid to former earners. Right now there is a surplus, but the longer life span and demographic shift in the country means there will need to be some adjustments made in the future.
speak of the devil…
Hmm, re-asking the same question in all caps, probably won’t change the answer, i.e. your website fellow is a loon of the first order.
And? Some story about placement brokering. Other than the apparent potential conflict issue, what’s the connection?
I like how he accuses the Prescott Click of messing with his family to (presumably) shut him up about this issue. I think Prescott Click is either the alter ego of a superhero I haven’t heard of, or he means a clique from Prescott, Arizona.
Also, the author’s day trading skillz are remarkable.
I think the U.S government has more money than it lets on. What about the gold in Fort Knox? What about those incidental territories that we don’t use? What about oil we have in Alaska and off the Gulf? I bet we have technology that could be sold, too.
The government made him spell clique wrong.
And do we really need 50 states? Think how much money we’d save by getting rid of some of those less populous states. I mean, do we really need TWO Dakotas?
We could get a lot for our nuclear bomb technology.
Here’s a list of major stockholders for Microsoft. Notice there isn’t a single government organization listed.
However, an organization called COLLEGE RETIREMENT EQUITIES FUND owns about 47 million shares (which is pretty tiny, compared with Bill Gates’ 709 million).
The College Retirement Equities Fund happesn to be the CREF in TIAA-CREF. In other words, it’s a big pension fund.
Since TIAA-CREF specializes in retirement plans for educational, medical and other non-profit organizations, I’m sure much of their assets come from government pension plans. Which means, I suppose that governments invest in the company, which then invests in Microsoft and other stocks.
But the important point is, those investments aren’t some public sector slush fund. They’re the funds that are backing pension plans, health insurance, etc. For example, CalPers, the biggest state fund, manages retirement benefits for 1.6 million public employees, and health insurance for 1.3 million. (Warning:PDF) Its total fund is a little over $1 billion.
Now, **koufax, ** here’s my point. According to Burien’s argument, California could liquidate the $1 billion in assets CalPers has built up, and presumably solve its budget problems. But then what? Liquidating those investments would mean CalPers wouldn’t be able to fund its pension and health plans, leaving the public employees who rely on those pension and health plans out in the cold.
Where’s the logic in that?
This is from yesterdays LA TIMES
“With $200 billion in assets, CalPERS is the nation’s largest public pension fund, responsible for ensuring steady retirement checks for 1.6 million state and local government workers, retirees and their families.”
where did you get 1 billion dollars??
And the California state budget is $100 billion. So if you liquidate CALPERS you could fund the budget for two years.
But you can’t liquidate CALPERS. (As I keep saying, it is not liquid assets.) It is not the state’s money. It is the property of those in the retirement system. And by keeping money in the investment fund, you can provide them their money - which they are legally and morally entitled to - essentially forever.
What kind of “economic expert” would make that deal? Why would anyone even suggest that deal? Do you have a pension? A 401K? Anything? If I said I was taking it for the good of all the people would you object?
How many times do we need to say it? There is no pot of public money that governments are holding. You cannot liquidate government to run government. You can’t sell off the pension funds. They are allocated already, to people who have put in their own money and time and service and have legal contracts to receive funding for them.
This guy is a loon, and a particularly abhorrent one at that. I am vested in the New York State pension system. That’s my money for my retirement I earned with my years that he wants to rip off. Not the state’s money or the public’s money. My personal money. That’s the only way you can get that money he’s talking about. By stealing it from the people it is legally obligated to. (This is unrelated to the “taxation is theft” idiocy. My pension funds belong to me the way any private pension funds belong to you.) There’s an excellent reason no one other than a few loons on the fringe have paid him any attention in the decade or more he’s been spouting this nonsense. He is wrong, factually and morally.
I think some people have even less of an understanding of economics than I do.
I also think they vastly overestimate the ability of politicians to agree on anything. For the government to be sitting on valuable assets, all the involved politicians would have to agree that sitting on them is best. Why, if these assets exist, are no mainstream politicians arguing to sell them?
He is not advocating LIQUIDATING anything. He is saying that all of the investments are generating huge amounts of profits which could be used to lower taxes and still fund all of the retirement accounts.
Now, I don’t know if this is true or not. When I originally posted this topic in GENERAL QUESTIONS, I was looking for anyone who had actually listened to this guy’s tapes, and if they had, either agreed or disagreed, because I found what he had to say was amazing and I thought that it couldn’t possibly be true.
Instead, all I got was people saying “No this is impossible, he must be crazy!” without even listening to the guy.
But I repeat, he is not saying to liquidate the funds, but to put some of the profits back where the money benefits society in the form of lower taxes etc.