Pension Tidal Wave Looms over Defense Budget

Walter Russell Mead links to and discusses a Financial Times article on unfunded pension liabilities; over the past few decades, military pension costs have inflated rapidly with no signs of slowing down: The liability currently stands at $1.2 trillion and is expected to rise to nearly $3 trillion over the next quarter-century.

And has this to say:

We need a national consensus that every change to a pension program needs to be actuarially sound, and all money promised to pensioners needs to be set aside on a continuing basis, based on reasonable assumptions about investment returns. This needs to be true at every level and in every branch of government.