We are sorry to have been out of contact these last few days, but we haven't been out of action.

No, we are ranging far and wide on your behalf, dear reader, searching for opportunities to get into trouble. We are in Buenos Aires, where we have just closed on a large ranch. Why Argentina? It seems to us, to offer a very high quality of life at a very low price, and because it is a new adventure for us.

Argentina is a country of booms and busts. It seems to be in a boom phase for the last three years. If previous cycles repeat themselves, we can look forward to another 10 or more years before the next bust.

Buying a piece of property in a foreign country is always an adventure. You never quite know what is going on. Friday's experience was no exception.

"Look at him," said our lawyer as we made our way through traffic. "He is such a bumpkin; he doesn't even know how to cross the street."

Our lawyer is a city slicker. The owner of the ranch we were buying is not. Instead, he is an agreeable man from the country, whom we immediately liked. It was a shame he was about to be run over.

He had ventured out into the middle of the street as if he expected the cars to shy away from him, like cattle. Drivers in Buenos Aires must be among the most aggressive in the world. If they had had horns on the front of their cars, Senor Rodriguez would have been gored.

*** The city of Duluth, Minnesota made a "doleful discovery" recently, reports the New York Times. Apparently, the town had been promising lifetime health care to all of the town's retired workers, their spouses and their children up to 26.

Unfortunately, no one ever stopped to figure out how much that would cost
- until a few years ago. After months of data collecting, an actuary finally came up with an estimate of how much it would cost to provide free lifetime health care to this group.

The total bill? About $178 million, more than double the city's operating budget.

"Duluth's doleful discovery is about to be repeated across the country, continues the Times article. "Thousands of government bodies, including states, cities, towns, school districts and water authorities, are in for the same kind of shock in the next year or so. For years, governments have been promising generous medical benefits to millions of schoolteachers, firefighters and other employees when they retire, yet experts say that virtually none of these governments have kept track of the mounting price tag. The usual practice is to budget for health care a year at a time, and to leave the rest for the future.

"Off the government balance sheets - out of sight and out of mind - those obligations have been ballooning as health care costs have spiraled and as the baby-boom generation has approached retirement. And now the accounting rulemaker for the public sector, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, says it is time for every government to do what Duluth has done: to come to grips with the total value of its promises, and to report it to their taxpayers and bondholders."

Bill Bonner is the President of Agora Publishing.  For more on Bill Bonner, visit The Daily Reckoning.