A Run On The Fund

A sad and scary drama has been playing out in Dallas over the last few days.  The drama was a run on the reserves of a public pension fund, and the latest act was a lawsuit and a resulting decision to suspend lump-sum withdrawals from the fund.

The fund is the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund, and the actors included the mayor, who brought the lawsuit seeking to stop the withdrawals that were depleting the fund’s liquid assets, and the board of trustees of the fund, who finally voted to stop the withdrawals in the face of a possible restraining order.  The run began when the board announced proposed benefits cuts in August.  At that point, some retirees began taking advantage of an option that allowed them to take lump sum payments from the fund, and more than $500 million was withdrawn, leaving only $729 million in liquid assets.  With the fund needing at least $600 million in liquid assets on hand, and requests for another $154 million in lump sum withdrawals pending, the math was irrefutable and the result was inevitable.  The trustees had to act if the fund is to be salvaged.

And now the fund is asking the city for a $1.1 million bailout.  No one wants to leave police and firefighters without pensions they were promised, of course, but how many taxpayers are going to be willing to fund a bailout of a pension system that pays far richer benefits than they are earning in their 401(k)s . . . if they have any retirement savings at all?

The Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund is not unique.  Its problems — overly rich benefits in view of increasing life expectancy, guaranteed interest returns that were hopelessly out of whack with market returns, overvalued assets and risky investments, underfunding, public officials and boards that kick the actuarial can down the road, hoping that the magic pension fund fairy will somehow help the fund to avoid a crash, and ultimately a request for a public bailout — are found or will be found in many public pension funds.  The Dallas situation is likely to be a precursor of what we may see in many other towns, counties, and states, as decades of neglect, mismanagement and ill-advised guarantees finally come to a choke point.

We can hope that the Dallas fund will make changes to restore sanity to its benefit structure and allow the fund to survive, and we can hope that pension fund boards and officials elsewhere in America take note and take necessary action to address their own situations.  We can hope — but I doubt it’s going to happen.  Too many of those boards and officials are themselves hoping that the curtain doesn’t get pulled back to reveal just how dire their underfunding situations actually are.  We’re going to hear a lot more about public pension funds in the coming years, and it isn’t going to be pretty.

Jon Snow And J.R.

Today we’re killing time before the first episode of the new season of Game of Thrones airs.  Between now and then we’ll probably watch a few of last season’s final episodes to make sure we are fully caught up and current on the characters, but we’ll tune in without fail to see if there is a big reveal on Jon Snow.  Could he somehow, some way, perhaps with the aid of his direwolf Ghost — might turn out to be aptly named, eh? — survive the brutal, literal stab in the back attack by his brothers on the Night’s Watch?

I can’t think of a TV show that has has the same kind of pre-season anticipation since the Dallas “Who Shot J.R.?” controversy back in the 1980.  For those who didn’t watch Dallas back then, the controversy was not only who shot the despicable but roguishly charming J.R. Ewing, but also whether J.R. would survive.  Since Larry Hagman was the star of that incredibly popular show, however, everybody figured J.R. would pull through, so the big question was who shot him — not an easy call since J.R. had managed to cheat, outmaneuver, embarrass and humiliate pretty much everybody on the show.

The Game of Thrones cliffhanger is of a different kind, of course, because it’s been clear since the outset that major characters are routinely knocked off — the Stark clan alone has been decimated — but also because there are so many other rich plot threads left dangling.  So Jon Snow could easily be dead and gone, with no more muss or fuss, but there’s lot of other things to wonder about.  Will we get to see Sansa Stark knock off the horrendous Bolton Bastard — hopefully in painful, bloody, graphic fashion?  What about Daenerys, and Tyrion Lannister, and the dragons?  What the heck are Bran Stark and Hodor and the frog-eaters doing north of the wall?  And I’ll be happy just to see any screen time for my favorite character, Arya Stark.

Game of Thrones has become quite the phenomenon.  Who would have thought that a fantasy TV show would develop such a rabid following?

Tailgate Time

It’s tailgate time. Bucks and Ducks both representing in a cold Texas breeze. Game time is drawing near!

Off To Big D

This morning it’s off to Dallas for the National Championship Game.  For me, and for many others, it will be a circuitous journey.

Not surprisingly, flights from Columbus, Ohio to Dallas, Texas became a hot commodity as of about 1 a.m. on January 2, 2015.  By the time I secured a ticket to the National Championship Game to root on the Buckeyes, reservations for flights to Dallas prior to the game fell into two categories:  already sold out or outrageously overpriced.  As is their right in a capitalistic economy, airlines followed the law of supply and demand and jacked up their prices for flights.  As is our right, prudent members of Buckeye Nation explored their ability to secure other, more reasonably priced methods of getting to the game.

So, today I’m flying to Oklahoma City via Atlanta. Then I will rent a car and then drive about 200 miles south to Dallas.  This is similar to the fun trip Russell and I had to the Ohio State-Miami National Championship Game, when we flew to San Diego and then drove through the desert to Tempe, Arizona.  And I’m not alone in choosing an indirect route.  Others are flying to Houston and then taking to the highways, and still others are already on a 1,000-mile road trip to Dallas, hoping that they don’t get sidetracked by a winter storm.

The main thing is to get there and cheer on the Buckeyes.  If the journey becomes an adventure, so much the better.  Go Bucks!

Ebola On A Plane, And In The U.S.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has announced that a person has brought the Ebola virus into the United States on a commercial airplane flight.  The man, who was not exhibiting symptoms of the virus at the time, landed in Dallas on September 20.  He is being treated at a Dallas hospital, and in the meantime the CDC is sending a team to Dallas to try to figure out who else may have been infected.

How big of a deal is this news?  That’s not clear — but it certainly would be better if it hadn’t happened.  According to the CDC website, Ebola is transmitted by coming into contact with the blood or bodily fluids of someone who is infected with the disease, or with the clothing or other items that have come into contact with those substances.  The website actually addresses what the CDC would do under these circumstances:  “If a traveler is infectious or exhibiting symptoms during or after a flight, CDC will conduct an investigation of exposed travelers and work with the airline, federal partners, and state and local health departments to notify them and take any necessary public health action.”  The website doesn’t specify what the “necessary public health action” might be.

For those of us who have to travel as part of their jobs, this news is somewhat unnerving.  Airports and airplanes are the great crossroads of the modern world, where your path might intersect for a few seconds with travelers from faraway lands while you wait to board a plane or go through security or get some crappy grub at a fast-food outlet.  In a modern airport, you could be sneezed upon by people from just about anywhere, or unknowingly sit in a seat that minutes ago was vacated by a complete stranger whose health condition is absolutely unknown.  How many people were transported in the plane that brought the infected man to this country before anyone became aware this issue existed?  How do we know where the infected man sat, or whether he used the bathroom?

We’re probably not to the point where people will be traveling in hazmat suits, but don’t be surprised if you see an outbreak of those mouth and nose masks the next time you take a commercial airline flight.

On That Dallas Day

President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed 50 years ago today.  Fifty years is a long time, but in some ways the Kennedy assassination seems even more distant and remote.  So much has happened since, and so much of it has been bad.  The world is such a different place now, it is almost as if the shooting in Dallas occurred in another reality altogether.

I was a first-grader when it happened.  I remember a scratchy voice coming out of the polished wooden PA system box above the blackboard and announcing that the President had died, and our teacher shocked and sobbing.  But, of course, I was just a little kid, not quite sure who the President was, even, or what this would mean for me or my family.  Everything I know about President Kennedy — the romance of “Camelot,” the inspiring speeches, the successes, the failures, and the details of his personal life — I’ve learned since his death, with the information, always, shaped and colored by the terrible senselessness of his assassination.  The impact of his death on how his legacy was viewed in the years after his death shouldn’t surprise anyone; America lost a vigorous young President and the promise he brought with him, and the country was profoundly shaken.  Even now, half a century later, it is hard to view things with the abstract objectivity of historians.

Students of popular culture tend to put things into neat packages.  For many, the story is of a boring, stodgy America during the 1950s, followed by the short sunburst of the Kennedy years, and then a country that lost its way after bullets rained down on that Dallas motorcade.  That story, I think, is a bit too tidy and, perhaps, confuses a timeline with causation.  The ’50s were not a Norman Rockwell painting, and the Kennedy presidency was not the golden era that it was once depicted to be.  To be sure, the years after the shooting were tumultuous, with race riots, the Vietnam War, anti-war protests, more assassinations, Apollo moon landings, and profound social changes, but did the Kennedy assassination cause, or even contribute significantly, to those events?  We can safely conclude that the Apollo moon landings would not have happened but for the challenge issued by a newly elected President in 1961, and we know from that lesson and others that individual people can alter and shape the future — but how many of the signature events of the ’60s were the inevitable result of historical forces long since set in motion, bound to happen no matter who was President?

Historians will comb the record of the 1000 days of the Kennedy presidency to try to determine whether his assassination should be viewed like that of President Lincoln, whose death clearly affected the course of Reconstruction after the Civil War, or like that of Presidents Garfield and McKinley, whose killings are treated like mere eddies in the onrushing current of history.  For average Americans, the question is much more basic:  If President Kennedy had survived, would our world now be a better place?  Unfortunately, we’ll never know the answer.

A Twister’s Awesome Power

If you thought the movie Twister was an exaggeration, think again.  Dallas was hit by a huge storm earlier this week, and the footage of a tornado ripping through a truck stop and tossing trailers into the air like playing cards is pretty amazing stuff.

My sister Cathy has always been terrified of tornadoes.  Looking at this footage gives you a good understanding why.