Dale Dorsey isn’t happy.
After working 33 years, he’s facing a 55% cut to his pension benefits, a blow which he says will “cripple” his family and imperil the livelihood of his two children, one of whom is in the fourth grade and one of whom is just entering high school.
Dorsey attended a town hall meeting in Kansas City on Tuesday where retirees turned out for a discussion on “massive” pension cuts proposed by the Central States Pension Fund, which covers 400,000 participants, and which will almost certainly go broke within the next decade.
“A controversial 2014 law allowed the pension to propose [deep] cuts, many of them by half or more, as a way to perhaps save the fund,” The Kansas City Star wrote earlier this week adding that “two much smaller pensions also have sought similar relief under the law, and still more pensions are significantly underfunded.”
“What’s happening to us is a microcosm of what’s going to happen to the rest of the pensions in the United States,” said Jay Perry, a longtime Teamsters member.
Jay is probably correct.
Everywhere you look – food, clothes, insurance, rents, electric – everything but gas is on a steady upward spiral. When you get the package home or examine the insurance policy, and compare it to a package or policy from a year ago, it contains less product even as the price rose. At the same time, the sources of our resources are restricting on a trajectory which implies they may actually dry up completely at some point.
As a society we have evolved a lot of complexity to the system of resources that supplies our carrying capacity. Yet the rules of r/K not only still apply, they are magnified. As resources enter a glut, increasingly massive swaths of the population begin “going r” and exploiting the free resource availability through welfare and subsidized housing. Still other individuals try to flock to the nation from foreign lands to exploit the resources themselves. Other r-strategists within the population who are naturally sympathetic to the r-strategy seek to help these exploiters to weigh down the system. The myriad of drives forcing the nation toward r and all synergistic.
As K-selection approaches, all of this dead weight on the financial ecosystem combines with the natural rise of the r-psychology, and before you know it, it triggers a collapse of a type you would never see in nature.
Most likely there will be an accompanying K-shift of a similar magnitude.