That provides a default happens, which it would not. First of all, looking at last year's budget (or, whatever we have instead of a real budget which we didn't have since 2009), the government income is about $3trln, while the government spends about $250bn for debt service. So there's plenty of money to pay the pension funds. The problem is that the budget plans to spend another $3.55trln on other stuff, and 3.8 > 3. Which is the source of the trouble. But saying "we have to cut 0.8" is not the same as "we can't pay 0.25 out of 3". We can, we just prefer to spend it on other things. But if push comes to shove, the possibility to prioritize debt over other spending is there. Of course, other spending then needs to be cut. But it needs to be cut anyway, just preferably in orderly manner, not as a firefighting measure. Which, of course, is not easy since we can't even have proper budget since 2009.