The government has a key responsibility to ensure that we all are better informed about healthy life expectancies, pension projections, the likelihood of needing social care and its cost, and how best to use our assets.
So a question of extraordinary financial, political, legal and moral complexity emerges, something that every one of us will be taking into town meetings and voting booths for years to come: Given how wrong past pension projections were, who should pay to fill the 13-figure financing gap?
David Simpson, a spokesman for the mayor of Yonkers, said pension cost projections were "often lowballs," so the city could get stuck.
The thinktank said the chancellor's reliance on a clampdown on tax avoidance and making savings from public sector pensions left projections for the public finances on an uncertain footing.
Despite repeated calls by watchdog groups for the state to reform its pension programs, the projection shows the cost of pensions rising significantly each year.
But it would also weaken the pension funds, the government projections show.
It is impossible to predict the exact size of any pension bailout, although economic projections by the agency suggest that in the worst case, a bailout within the next decade involving failures beyond the airlines could cost taxpayers up to $110 billion.
Instead of accepting projections of pension fund returns based on the assets they hold, Moody's wants to use a risk-free discount rate to assess pension fund liabilities.
Instead he denounced bloated public-sector pensions and Medicaid projections, although these are most people's reactions to the social irrationality and inequity of an economy into whose webs of corporate surveillance, groping, and indebtedness we are all being drawn.
Both Republicans and Democrats pointed out that the higher pension payment was only a projection and that the actual amount would not be known until August, leaving months to find alternatives to Mr. Gaffney's plan.
