Public pensions, mult-employer, single-employer, church plans: where do you draw the line between reasonable relief and bailout, and if there are pension bailouts to be had, who should get them?
Forbes post, “Pensions In A Pandemic: Is One Man’s Bailout Is Another Man’s Pension Funding Relief?”
if a federal level bailout of pensions requires a quid pro quo, lets make it the acceptance of the PGBC type of pension payments as the required change to the bailed out pension. This is a solution that no one will like but this is a problem with no solutions without pain. It has one virtue: it exists.
Are you speaking of the same PBGC that lobbied hard to slash pensions so they would not have to fund any loss of pensions? Another words we will take existing pensions any future pensions of workers so we end up just fine
It would be immoral to shift the burden in such a way that later-born generations are worse off but don’t know where it comes from, without an accounting, and without the beneficiaries of policies that led to the bailout being asked to contribute.
1) To the extent that underfunding was the main problem, tax exemptions for retirement income, as in Illinois, are unjust. Those who benefitted from lower past taxes wouldn’t suffer any of the resulting sacrifices. And tax exemptions specifically for public employee retirement income (as in New York) are even more unjust. Property tax breaks specifically for non-poor seniors are also unjust, if they left pension debts and other burdens behind.
2) Many pension funds are in trouble substantially (or in the case of New York City nearly exclusively) due to retroactive pension increases. Pensioners getting more than they were promised when they were hired, retiring years earlier, and on richer terms, and with lower contributions, due to political deals often done in secret, and generally asserted to cost nothing. That nothing was paid at the time just made the cost of those deals much larger.
Often, the only offset to this has been much worse benefits for new hires. It would be unjust to allow those increases to remain in place. If possible, some of them should be paid back by those who benefitted — not by later hired workers who did not.
If we bailout the unfunded pensions we need to bailout the millions of 401k’s hit hard by this crisis. One persons retirement is not more important than the others.