Question-and-Answer Session
[Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from the line of Carl Kirst with BMO Capital.
Carl Kirst - BMO Capital Markets
Hi, good morning everybody.
John W. Somerhalder II - Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
HeyCarl.
Carl Kirst - BMO Capital Markets
A few questions. Let me just start, John, so you made the comments early on the LEC side everything is going to sort of accommodating the ways with flat results through 2009. Two sort of clarifications on that, first Drew, as we're looking at the bad debt expense year-over-year, is that something that effectively as we get to the end of this year 2009 over 2008, we're going to stop seeing some of that increase i.e., I guess, the percentage of revenues if you will, whether its 1% or 1.5% I forget. That's kind of flattened out. Can you help me out there and two I also know it's in the results, there was a mention that pension expense was down and certainly there is general expectation that we're going to be seeing pension cost rise just given the state of the market?
John W. Somerhalder II - Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
Hi, Carl, I will take the question on bad debt first. I think two factors are impacting bad debt and as Drew talked about it's not as large because we don't have the exposure here in Georgia and SouthStar has done a very good job from their standpoint on managing the issue here around their customers in Georgia. But there really had be two factors that have been influenced that. One is the rising gas costs and the second is just the economy turning down. And so, we do anticipate the bad debt through next year especially with our expectation in the economy staying in the same condition its in now will be higher that has historically been.
However, in those jurisdictions we're also heading the rate cases in those next couple of years. So, we'll have the ability to take that into account when we file those rate cases and we deal with those issues. So, we do see the trend higher on bad debt particularly from the economy stand point. We may get a little relief from the standpoint of gas prices coming down.
And then I will turn it over to Drew to talk about the pension.
Andrew W. Evans - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
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