is because when it goes under, pbgc goes under. it's that big. they have 154,000 participants in that ohio in ohio, more than any other state. the majority of these state retirees are veterans, by the way. they receive about $360 million in annual benefits from their pensions. by the way, that money goes right back into the economy. they spend it. unfortunately, years of bad federal policy with respect to funding and withdrawal liability rules, losses on risky investments, and failure to take proactive action have brought many of these pension plans to the brink of insolvency. the result is that these hardworking ohioans in central states again face pension cuts of over 90% if no action is taken. that's unacceptable. we can't let that happen. by the way, it's not just a retirement security issue, as i said earlier. it's a jobs issue. the multiemployer pension system consists primarily of smaller businesses who face uncertainty and higher costs of doing business due to the liability they will face called withdrawal liability. more t

that pbgc for the multiemployer programs is protected to become insolvent in less than five years. over 1.4 million workers and retirees are in plans already in what is called critical and declining status, meaning they are facing benefit cuts of over 90%. so that's the problem. this chart can sort of show it to you. these are the assets at the start of the year 2019, 2020, 2021. this is what happens, the assets goes down, the liebilities go up -- liabilities go up. as you can see, the green is only going to last until 2025. and, again, with the new economic numbers, that will be exhausted even before that, which creates a real problem for those planned participants, the retirees, for the companies, they are going to have huge new liebilities, some of them -- liabilities they won't be able to handle it and for our economy because that will have an impact on the entire economy. so those workers who are expecting to have the benefit because they are still working and those retirees who are facing these cuts are looking to us to come up with a bipartisan solution to address this crisi