We live in precarious times, in many, many ways. But if you've got the attention span to at least look beyond the increasingly tragic daily headlines, you probably see a less newsworthy calamity on the horizon – that being the collective chaos of America's retirement plans.

I secretly suspect that the recent furor over that huge Powerball jackpot was partially the sound of the entire nation saying, "yes, I will admit it: Winning the lottery really is my retirement plan."

So it comes as a bit of a shock – especially when we hear that the country's public pension systems are so drastically and systematically underfunded that Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has to use a cartoon snake to get anyone to notice – that some folks are walking into retirement with $600,000 checks as part of their public employee retirement package.