Comments on: How and Why Josh Eidelson Went From Being a Labor Activist to a Labor Journalist (Also: Labor 101)

By: stuffisthings

stuffisthings — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 21:36:00 +0000

@WaityKatie Social Security’s trust fund is scheduled to start falling behind in the next few decades, and could be fixed with a tiny tweak to rates. Most state & local government and many large private pension plans are already either technically or actually insolvent and many would require billions and billions of dollars of additional investment to get current with where they should be. Employees with individual retirement accounts are entirely dependent on the continued performance of the stock market for their retirement income. If you happen to retire in or near a bad year, like, say, 2009, you’re sort of screwed.

I’m aware of many cases where people have lost their private pensions due to mismanagement or insolvency, but this has yet to happen to a single Social Security retiree.

By: WaityKatie

WaityKatie — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 21:30:15 +0000

@stuffisthings I’m just a little curious as to why you would trust the government more than employers to fund people’s retirement. They haven’t done a very good job with it so far.

By: WaityKatie

WaityKatie — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 21:29:19 +0000

@deepomega The sad part is that pensions used to be a common feature of all jobs. Now public employees are the only people who still have them, and they’re constantly being chastised and hated for it. Pensions are a good thing. Everyone should try to get one, not tear down the few who still have them until we’re all “equal” in having absolutely nothing. Blergh.

By: Tom Smucker

Tom Smucker — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 16:18:33 +0000

I am a retired Verizon employee with a pension, which was a part of the “cost” of employing me for 30 years. Deepomega has taken his or her eye off the ball by focusing on underfunded pensions. In the context of the war on unions described in the interview with Josh Eidelson Deepomega should take a look at all the fully funded pensions that have been gutted and sabotaged by owners. Read “Retirement Heist: by Ellen E, Schultz (Portfolio/Penquin). Schultz is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

By: deepomega

deepomega — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:18:54 +0000

@stuffisthings Me too. Wouldn’t prevent savings, just would move the social pressure into “keeping social security funded” instead. Also, you know, imagine if public employees weren’t getting 90% of their income in pensions when they retired at 50.

By: stuffisthings

stuffisthings — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 16:51:51 +0000

@deepomega I wonder how much money it would save the economy if we made social security, say, 50% more generous, raised payroll taxes proportionately (and applied them to all income), and then eliminated all other tax-advantaged retirement savings vehicles and non-SS pension plans. Tens of billions? Hundreds?

By: stuffisthings

stuffisthings — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 16:48:55 +0000

@Logan Sachon I guess they don’t make as much sense on a blog as in a magazine where they’re supposed to PULL your eyes away from the glorious advertisements towards the two-dollar-a-word prose filling the spaces in between.

By: Logan Sachon

Logan Sachon — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 16:43:35 +0000

@stuffisthings IT WAS AN EXPERIMENT! also i don’t like how pullquotes work i never know when i’m supposed to read them!

By: deepomega

deepomega — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 16:19:16 +0000

@WaityKatie It’s only a legal obligation if the contracts are written that way. With the UAW and the Big Three, the unions kept agreeing to fund less and less because it’s in their interest too. (Which will get people to quit – underfunding pensions or cutting pay increases?) There’s no legal way to make sure that pensions aren’t paid for by future generations. Put another way – neither unions nor management care about employees who haven’t even been hired yet.

By: r&rkd

r&rkd — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:52:51 +0000

One advantage of pension plans versus individual retirement accounts is that IRAs induce over-saving. Specifically, each individual fears outliving her savings, so she saves an amount that will cover her retirement beyond her average expected lifespan, in case she lives longer than average. When each individual does this, the result is an aggregate over-saving.

With a pension plan guaranteeing a pension for life, every participant’s contribution can be average. Some people will live longer and collect more, others will live shorter and get less, but plan participants can all contribute the average amount.

There are other problems this doesn’t solve, of course, like predicting mortality tables decades in the future, and the political opportunism deepomega mentions above. And maybe you think that people should save more (though superlow interest rates suggest that is currently not the case).