Tag: pensions

Yes, We Should Worry About Public Pensions

By James Kwak

In the wake of the Detroit bankruptcy, Paul Krugman has a post pooh-poohing concerns about public pensions. His conclusion:

“Nationwide, governments are underfunding their pensions by around 3 percent of $850 billion, or around $25 billion a year.

A $25 billion shortfall in a $16 trillion economy. We’re doomed!”

(Yes, that’s sarcasm.)

I know why Krugman wants to argue that this isn’t a problem. If everyone believes that public pensions are a big problem, then the austerity crew will convert that belief into a push to cut public pensions—just like they have tried to use future shortfalls in the Social Security and Medicare trust funds to insist on privatizing or voucherizing those programs.

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Yet More CEO Hypocrisy

By James Kwak

Several weeks ago, I wrote a column criticizing the “Fix the Debt” CEOs for saying that we should raise taxes while not mentioning the one tax break that means the most to them as individuals—the preferential rate for capital gains—and, in many cases, giving money to the presidential candidate who promised to protect that tax break for them.

A friend pointed out another glaring example of these CEOs’ hypocrisy. Of the CEOs in Fix the Debt, 71 lead public companies; of those, 41 have employee pension funds. Of those, only two pensions are fully funded; the other pensions are underfunded by an average of $2.5 billion, according to the Institute for Policy Studies.

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Bad Advice

By James Kwak

I’m starting teaching at the UConn law school this fall, so I got a folder of information in the mail about my retirement plan. UConn professors have a choice between a defined benefit plan (SERS, in which I would be a Tier III member) and a defined contribution plan called the Alternate Retirement Program, or ARP. (There’s also a Hybrid Plan that seems to be the defined benefit plan plus a cash-out option at retirement.)

I chose the Alternate Retirement Program for reasons that are complicated (I used a spreadsheet) and that I may get into another time. The main benefit of defined benefit plans is that they do a pretty good job of protecting you from investment risk and inflation risk, since the state bears most of it. The main downside is that if you will work either for a short time or a very long time at your employer, they have a lower expected value, even given conservative return assumptions. The other downside is counterparty risk.

Anyway, the ARP is a pretty good plan. The administrative costs are a flat 10 basis points.  It includes a reasonable number of index funds (although there are also actively-managed funds—more on that later). And the plan had the sense to ask for institutional share classes with low fees. For example, the S&P 500 index fund is the Vanguard Institutional Index Fund – Institutional Plus Shares, which has an expense ratio of 2 basis points. Adding the 10 bp of administrative fees, that’s still only 12 bp.* (Contrast this with Wal-Mart, for example, which, despite being the largest private-sector employer in the country, stuck its employees with retail fees in its 401(k) plan.)

But despite that, the plan then goes and encourages people to put money into expensive, actively-managed funds. I got a brochure subtitled “A Guide to Helping You Choose an Investment Portfolio” that was almost certainly written by ING, the plan administrator. It has the usual stuff about the importance of asset allocation and your tolerance for risk, and then provides “model portfolios” for various investor types.

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