"While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis" by Roger Lowenstein; Penguin Press; 288 pages; $26.

Pity the poor pensioner. Or at least pity the person who thinks they may one day be a pensioner.

In the past several years, pension problems have driven Detroit automakers to their knees, temporarily halted New York's subways and pushed San Diego to the verge of bankruptcy.

That's just the beginning, according to best-selling author Lowenstein. His latest book, "While America Aged," describes pensions as a "ticking time bomb" that could soon explode, leaving millions of retirees financially strapped.

Lowenstein - a longtime columnist for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times whose previous books range from a profile of Warren Buffett to an examination of the 2000 stock market crash - argues that the multiple illnesses of America's public and private pensions are much more serious than those that could affect Social Security, which he says have been exaggerated for political purposes.

As proof, he cites an estimate from Barclays Global Investors that the bill from pension failures could total as much as $900 billion. If that's true, it would rival the size of the current mortgage debacle.

Lowenstein picks three recent pension crises to prove his case: General Motors Corp., which has incurred multibillion dollar losses in recent years partly because of pension expenses; the Metropolitan Transportation Agency in New York, which endured a short-lived subway strike during pension-related labor negotiations; and the pension crisis in San Diego, which earned the civic moniker "Enron by the Sea."

Each pension crisis had its own unique trajectory.

Although a retelling of pension scandals might sound like a guaranteed cure for insomnia, Lowenstein stories are wry, well-dramatized tales of civic, corporate and union chicanery, with occasional dollops of humor as bureaucrats, executives and labor leaders scramble for an upper-hand in the pension game.

Lowenstein's chief cure for the pension problem is to require that all pension plans - public or private - pay for their benefits as they are earned instead of deferring payments to the future. That's a tough proposition that will require major realignments of government, business and labor.

But why have pensions in the first place? From Lowenstein's account, they seem to be a fairly inefficient way of providing what most foreign workers get through their governments: a decent retirement and health package.

Maybe the question of why other countries seem to do a better job providing benefits than the U.S. could be the topic of Lowenstein's next book.

- Dean Calbreath

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