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Jane the Actuary General Interest, Retirement

Forbes post, “When WEIRD People Have Weird Retirements: Some Comments On The ‘WEIRD’ Explanation Of Western Distinctiveness”

Originally published at Forbes.com on October 17, 2020.

 

Who are “WEIRD” people?

It’s a clever acronym, to denote people who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. But the acronym is meant to indicate something else as well, that psychologically, those of us whose ancestors hail from Western Europe, or who live in counties shaped by their culture, are weird, that is, different, in terms of our psychology, our norms, our sense of right and wrong, than the rest of the world. This is part of the thesis of a new book, The WEIRDest People in the World, by Joseph Henrich. The more remarkable part of that thesis, though, is something unexpected: that those differences have their origins in an unexpected source, the prohibition by the Catholic Church of marriages by people who were closely, or even distantly, related (as well as the requirement that the couple consent to the marriage and the prohibition of multiple spouses).

Now, readers may be wondering what this has to do with retirement — unless you’re a diligent enough follower of my writing to recall my April 2019 article about retirement in the Middle Ages. We may think that the notion of “retirement” is a modern one, and that as long ago as that, one worked until death or was simply cared for by one’s children, but that’s not true — even then, in Europe, newlyweds lived on their own, rather than staying in the family home to care for their parents as they aged. And that’s quite different than the “filial piety” of Confucian cultures or practices elsewhere (and, incidentally, the “Middle Ages” is a label that really only makes sense to use for Europe so that, as far as I’m concerned, “European Middle Ages” is redundant). Which means that Henrich’s theory provides insights that are helpful in thinking about retirement cross-culturally.

So let’s start with this: what are the psychological differences between WEIRD people and the rest of the world? Here are some of their traits: they (we) are “highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical.” Henrich writes in his first chapter that

“We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles. We aim to be ‘ourselves’ across contexts and see inconsistencies in others as hypocrisy rather than flexibility. . . . [W]e are less willing to conform to others when this conflicts with our own beliefs, observations and preferences. We see ourselves as unique beings, not as nodes in a social network that stretches out through space and back in time. . . . When reasoning, WEIRD people tend to look for universal categories and rules with which to organize the world . . . . That is, we know a lot about individual trees but often miss the forest. WEIRD people are also particularly patient and often hardworking. Through potent self-regulation, we can defer gratification. . . . WEIRD people tend to stick to impartial rules or principles and can be quite trusting, honest, fair, and cooperative toward strangers or anonymous others. In fact, relative to most populations, we WEIRD people show relatively less favoritism toward our friends, families, co-ethnics, and local communities than other populations do. We think neoptism is wrong, and fetishize abstract principles over context, practicality, relationships, and expediency. Emotionally, WEIRD people are often racked with guilt, as they fail to live up to their culturally inspired, but largely self-imposed, standards and aspirations. In most non-WEIRD societies, shame — not guilt — dominates people’s lives.”

Henrich provides many examples of psychological studies (e.g., experiments conducted among university students globally, or by anthropologists in small villages) which show that WEIRD societies are the outliers in all these traits. One particularly striking one for me was the Passenger’s Dilemma: if you are in a car with a friend, and he gets into an accident, do you lie on his behalf to save him from legal consequences? Henrich shows the results in a graph rather than a table, but as it turns out, the footnote send me to a source with the numerical results, among which are that the the following percentages of people would refuse to lie, believing, that is, that universal norms of right and wrong are more important than the desire to protect our kith and kin:

  • Switzerland, 97%
  • USA, 93%
  • Canada, 93%
  • Ireland, 92%
  • Sweden, 92%
  • Australia, 91%
  • UK, 91%
  • Germany, 87%
  • Spain, 75%,
  • Japan, 68%,
  • Greece, 61%,
  • China, 47%,
  • Russia, 44%
  • South Korea, 37%.

What’s more, this particular book (Riding the Waves of Culture by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner) focused on the importance of culture in global business and the questions were posed to individuals in business, which means that, one presumes people from non-WEIRD cultures would be more likely to be influenced by WEIRD norms (and, possibly, immigrants and minorities within WEIRD cultures themselves would be underrepresented in the survey group).

After establishing the distinctiveness of WEIRD culture, Henrich gives a lesson in the development of clans and states, and explains that, as people began to live in larger groups, clans developed, and, in most parts of the world, even when premodern states developed, intensive kin-based institutions remained important: extended households, arranged marriages with relatives (cousins), reliance on kin for protection and caregiving, and prevalence of polygynous marriages. This is still the norm in many parts of the world, and might have been the case in Europe, too, but for the “money wrench” of the Catholic Church’s regulations around marriage and family, what he calls the Marriage and Family Program, or the MFP. Beginning in late Antiquity, the Catholic Church promulgated prohibitions that increasingly expanded the restrictions placed on marriage, first to remarrying the sister of one’s deceased wife, then marriage between cousins or step-relatives, then second-cousins, second-cousins once-removed, third cousins, and eventually sixth cousins, before, in 1215, dialing back the prohibition to extend only to third cousins.

Why did the Church implement these prohibitions? The short answer is that the bishops and popes of the late Roman Empire and early Middle Ages considered them incestuous, but why? There’s no particular theological answer, and the prohibitions of the Eastern (Orthodox) Church(es) are much looser. Certainly, the overall discouragement of marriage benefitted the church directly, when people entered religious life and donated their land to the church (e.g., religious orders). Loosening the ties of kin and clan also strengthened people’s identity as “Christian.” What’s more, the shift from a third-cousin to a sixth-cousin prohibit was, to some extent, a fluke; Roman civil law counted each step up and back down a family tree as a “degree of consanguinity” but the medieval/Germanic method counted each step up alone (as we do today; our third-cousins have a shared great-great-grandfather), doubling the size of the family tree of prohibited relationships.*

This last bit fits in neatly with Henrich’s explanation that, from a cultural evolution perspective, in the same manner as in “regular” evolution, random mutations simply occur and enable to species to be more successful if they are useful, so, to, this was a mutation by chance which helped Christianity become more successful in spreading through formerly-pagan Europe, as the new norms of the MFP had its beneficial effects.

And, interestingly, these prohibitions, and their impacts, were not experienced Europe-wide. Southern Italy, in whole or part, was ruled by the Byzantine Empire during the early Middle Ages, and for a fair stretch Sicily was controlled by Arabs, as was, of course, Spain. And Sicily remains distinctive for its disproportionately high rate of cousin-marriage relative to the rest of Europe.

So how can you know that there is a connection between cousin-marriage, and high-intensity kinship institutions, in the first place? In the first place, Henrich compiles some truly remarkable graphs pairing Kinship Intensity Index (which looks at historical norms, from around the 1900s) and rates of cousin marriage even today with differences in psychological “norm” enforcement (more cousin-marriage, more community norms), individualism (more cousin-marriage, less individualism), trust of people outside one’s on group (more cousin marriage, less out-group trust), belief in universal ethical principles, such as the obligation to be honest at the expense of protecting kin or family (more cousin-marriage, less universalism), and so on.

He then traces the path that brought Western Europe from its early medieval “backwardness” (relative to the Byzantines and, later, the Islamic Golden Age) to the Industrial Revolution. Although the feudal system had lords, knights, dukes, kings, and the rest, the cities of the High Middle Ages were self-governing, with democratic institutions. Universities were likewise self-governing, as were the guilds for craftsmen (and women), and even monasteries voted on their Abbots, rather than this being a hereditary role. Merchant’s guilds enabled trade. Craftsmen took on apprentices from outside their family, and journeymen literally journeyed outside their hometowns, to further develop their skills — and all because, with clans and cousin- and arranged-marriage dismantled by the church’s prohibitions, new institutions arose to meet those needs instead, but in a way that enabled far more development, markets, even self-control and patience:

“Intensive kinship, through its strong normative obligations to a web of distant relatives, may create pressures that similarly disincentivize the cultivation of self-control or patience. I’ve seen this frequently in Fiji: an industrious person works hard to save money, but then some distant cousin-brother needs cash for a funeral, wedding, or medical procedure, so the nest egg evaporates. This makes sense because intensive kin-based institutions manage risk, retirement, and harmony collectively — through relationships — instead of via individual self-control and secure savings” (p. 377).

And, yes, Protestantism had the effect of intensifying the emerging WEIRD psychology, as well as emerging because in some respects it was a better fit for the new mindsets, with its emphasis on individuals relating to God directly rather than through institutions, and its promotion of individual literacy and Bible-reading. Finally, when it comes to the inventions that sparked the Industrial Revolution, they were the outcome of cities in which resources were available and knowledge was shared with a “collective brain.” Here, too, religious orders played a role: the Cistercians had monasteries which he labels “monastery-factories” all across Europe, and the abbots shared their knowledge with each other not just about theology but about “their best technical, industrial, and agricultural practices” in the medieval and early modern periods, and the monks then shared this knowledge with their local communities (p 446). But it was the teeming cities where innovation mushroomed — and, indeed, the number of people living in cities of over 10,000 increase 20 fold in the millennium from 800 to 1800, while at the same time, the number only doubled in the Islamic world and remained flat in China.

Finally, Henrich addresses the rapid development of Japan, South Korea, and China in modern times. How did this occur even though they weren’t WEIRD? In the first place, “these societies had all experienced long histories of agriculture and state-level governments that had fostered the evolution of cultural values, customs, and norms encouraging formal education, industriousness, and a willingness to defer gratification” (p. 476). Second, they each had top-down governments which, when they observed the development of Western countries, were able to copy many Western institutions in an “off the shelf” manner even if they hadn’t developed organically as the eventual result of the MFP.

So what ultimate conclusions do we draw from Henrich’s insights?

Looking at global retirement, one can easily enough connect Japan’s troubles, for examples, in transitioning from a norm where children take care of their elderly parents, to a social welfare state and/or expectations that one saves for one’s own retirement.

But is there a take-away for Americans? Could an understanding of WEIRD psychology provide insights into not just retirement in the past but what policy might be most successful in the future? That is, at the least, a question to ponder.

And one last note: do I recommend the book to readers? Depends on your patience — he takes 500 pages to make his case; the book is well-written and explains the issues well so you don’t need to be an Ivory Tower scholar to make sense of it, but, let’s face it, I’d still like to see a version for the more casual, less committed reader.

 

December 2024 Author’s note: the terms of my affiliation with Forbes enable me to republish materials on other sites, so I am updating my personal website by duplicating a selected portion of my Forbes writing here.

Jane the Actuary Retirement

Forbes post, “Pension Failures, Governance Failures – Illinois Once Again Is The Poster Child”

Originally published at Forbes.com on October 5, 2020.

 

Longtime readers with particularly good memories may recall my first actuary-splainer: “Why Public Pension Pre-Funding Matters.” Knowing that many public pensions have had a long legacy of unfunding, and that the elected officials in charge of those plans have been plenty happy to operate them as, effectively, pay-as-you-go plans, I explained why this is actually a very bad idea indeed.

As a refresher, failure to fund pensions as they are earned traps future generations with legacy costs they may be unable to pay, if the size of the economy or the population shrinks. (You might think that won’t happen, but it has.) Even if those future generations are able to pay, it’s still unfair to expect them to pay off a prior generation’s debts, rolling over debt to their own children, and only implementing an alternate form of benefit (such as a defined contribution plan or even a shift to participating in Social Security) at great cost. It enables a mindset of promising pensions without paying any regard to their affordability for those future generations. (Again, it’s happened over and over again.) And funding failures go hand-in-hand with governance failures, which are both a cause and a consequence of the former: un- or under-funded pensions inspire gaming the system (passing the costs on to someone else, finding loopholes and tricks to avoid the reality of the debt) and, yes, tend to be a part of a general culture of faulty governance, if not outright corruption.

Can I prove that there is a direct connection between underfunded pensions and corruption? Admittedly not easily — for starters because there is no universally agreed-upon measure of corruption. In 2015, Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight produced rankings based on several metrics, among them the results of a survey of state political reporters. Pairing this survey with the most recent summary of pension funding status by state produces a correlation coefficient of .34. Eliminate New York (where its courts have mandated pension funding) and the correlation rises to .39. (Note that this excludes purely local plans such as Chicago’s pensions.) It’s not a slam-dunk, as this falls in the “weak-to-moderate” relationship level, but, at the same time, this doesn’t take into account the various ways in which a state can be poorly governed without violating anti-corruption laws. Separately, pairing up pension funding levels with U.S. News’ Best States Ranking submetric of Fiscal Stability produces a correlation of .62, though that speaks more to the end result than the route our elected officials take to get there.

But I raise this, again, because Illinois is up to its old tricks, again.

Here are three news items:

First, as reported by Wirepoints, Moody’s is pushing back on proposals to re-amortize pensions.

“Moody’s Investors Service has issued its next warning to Illinois, noting pension debts are overwhelming the state’s economy and will continue to do so over the next year. Moody’s also cautioned against any ideas of improperly funding pensions as a way of providing relief for the state’s worsening budget. The agency said any ‘reamortization’ of pension debts would be credit negative. Moody’s rates Illinois just one notch above junk with a negative outlook. . . .

“The rating agency also quashed the hopes of some Illinois activists who continue to pursue debt ‘reamortization’ as a way to kick the can. Reamortization of Illinois’ pension debt would push repayments further into the future, weakening the pension funds even more. Moody’s added, ‘…any cuts to its pension contributions would only worsen [the state’s] long-term fiscal position by adding to its unfunded liabilities…Relying heavily on strategies like deficit borrowing or “re-amortizing” its pension contribution schedule would however be credit negative for the state, since such tactics only add to a long-term cycle of borrowing, or deferring payment, to address the consequences of those past actions.’”

Who’s pushing to re-amortize pensions? The Illinois Municipal League has called for this, for one, back in August, as has the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, for multiple years, with a pension bond proposal which, in the fine print, reduces the funding target in 2045 from 90% to 70%. How tempted is Pritzker by these promises of an easy fix? He had proposed to stretch out the 90% funding target from 2045 to 2052, back in 2019, then backed away and has been silent on the subject since, but one presumes Moody’s feels there is a real risk, in order to find it necessary to warn against it.

Second, having rejected pension reform, the governor is putting all his eggs in the the so-called “Fair Tax” basket, threatening “nightmare” cuts or tax hikes if voters don’t approve it, and, what’s more, he and other supporters are engaging in misleading claims in order to gain voter support. What’s more, it turns out that the misleading claims have found their way not only to advertisements and politicans’ mouths, but to the actual ballot itself.

As context, Illinois’s state constitution prohibits a graduated income tax, prohibits more than one income tax, and keys the corporate tax rate off the personal income tax in an 8:5 ratio. The proposed tax amendment, which he and other supporters are calling a “fair tax,” would change each of those, allowing unlimited brackets, allowing multiple taxes (for instance, making the first-time implementation of a tax on retirement income more acceptable by using lower rates), and keying the maximum corporate tax rate off the highest tax bracket. In the tax structure which would come into effect in 2021 if the amendment passes, due to existing legislation, corporate would jump to the highest in the nation.

However, the ballot itself does not contain the actual amendment. Instead, it contains an “explanation” of the amendment, as prepared by its supporters, as follows:

“The proposed amendment grants the State authority to impose higher income tax rates on higher income levels, which is how the federal government and a majority of other states do it. The amendment would remove the portion of the Revenue Article of the Illinois Constitutions that is sometimes referred to as the ‘flat tax,’ that requires all taxes on income to be at the same rate. The amendment does not itself change tax rates. It gives the State ability to impose higher rates on those with higher income levels and lower income tax rates on those with middle or lower income levels. You are asked to decide whether the proposed amendment should become part of the Illinois Constitution.”

As Wirepoints observes, there are multiple untruths, half-truths, and omissions in this description.

First, to “impose higher income tax rates on higher income levels” is in fact not “how the federal government and a majority of others states do it.” Of those states with graduated income tax rates, only 15 have rates and brackets that single out “higher income” taxpayers; the remainder have highest-marginal-rates that start at middle-class incomes, or even lower levels. Of course, it is literally true that $50,000 is a “higher income” than $20,000, but “higher income levels” is commonly understood in an absolute sense, not simply relative to someone who hears less.

Second, the explanation likewise promises that the higher tax rates will fall on “higher income levels” and that “those with middle or lower income levels” will have lower tax rates. But there is nothing in the amendment that ensures that middle-income taxpayers will have a lower marginal tax rate than upper-income folk.

Third, the amendment’s explanation omits the removal of the “only one tax” provision as well as the keying of the corporate tax rate off the highest tax bracket.

In fact, as it happens, just today the Illinois Policy Institute filed a lawsuit asking for a Corrective Notice to be included in ballots to remove the misleading language. Will they succeed? Illinois being Illinois, I have my doubts, but their concerns are justified.

Finally, Illinois is in the midst of yet another corruption scandal.

In this case, it’s a matter of bribery.

This past July, the Chicago Tribune reported,

“A federal investigation orbiting the political operation of Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan drew much closer to the powerful politician Friday, as prosecutors unveiled a criminal complaint charging ComEd in a “years-long bribery scheme” involving jobs, contracts and payments to Madigan allies.

“Prosecutors said the utility attempted to “influence and reward” Madigan by providing financial benefits to some close to him, often through a key confidant and adviser at the center of the probe. Madigan, the nation’s longest-serving speaker and Illinois Democratic Party chairman, has not been charged with any wrongdoing.”

Already the company has agreed to a $200 million fine.

Then, last week, the Tribune reported that former ComEd executive Fidel Marquez has pled guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors.

“The fact that Marquez is now also working with investigators significantly ramps up the pressure against others who have been implicated — but not yet charged — in the scheme, including former ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore; lobbyist and former ComEd executive John T. Hooker; Jay Doherty, a consultant and former President of the City Club; and Michael McClain, a former lobbyist for the utility and one of Madigan’s closest confidants.”

But as far as Illinois politics are concerned, it’s (mostly) business as usual. There is no interest among House Democrats in investigating Madigan’s conduct, and the attempt by minority House Republicans to do so has been met by roadblocks; not only has Madigan refused to testify but other leaders in the House are not confronting him. There are small encouraging signs — for instance, Gov. Pritzker has actually called for Madigan to testify, and Democratic state Rep. Stephanie Kifowit of exurban Oswego has announced she will challenge Madigan for speaker in January.

(For a history of Madigan’s connection to corruption, see the Tribune’s “House Speaker Michael Madigan says it’s not ‘ethically improper’ to find government jobs for people. Here’s what he’s failing to mention.” It’s a long article, detailing his legacy of patronage jobs and as the “rainmaker-in-chief” at a property tax appeals law firm.)

Patronage, bribery, deceit in ballot amendments, and a legacy of pension underfunding and trickery — it’s all part and parcel of a mindset that goes back to Mike Royko’s proposed new motto for city of Chicago: rather than Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden), it should be Ubi Est Mea (Where’s Mine). Of course, Royko proposed that decades ago, but Illinois is far from leaving that mindset behind.

Update:

Here is Mike Royko, writing in 1967:

“The old [motto] is Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden).

“The invention of the concrete mixer has made the old motto meaningless.

“The new motto — Ubi Est Mea? — means ‘Where’s Mine?’

“The phrase ‘Where’s Mine?’ can be heard wherever improvements for the city are being planned.

“It is the watchword of the new Chicago, the cry of the money brigade, the chant of the city of the big wallet.”

Folks, the wallet might not be as big any longer, but the expectations remain.

 

December 2024 Author’s note: the terms of my affiliation with Forbes enable me to republish materials on other sites, so I am updating my personal website by duplicating a selected portion of my Forbes writing here.

Jane the Actuary Retirement

Forbes post, “Never Mind Biden’s 401(k) Plan – Are Pension Plan Tax Breaks Fair?”

Originally published at Forbes.com on October 4, 2020.

 

Tax breaks for pensions?

No, I’m not talking about the small number of states which don’t tax retirement income.

I’m talking about the fact that anyone who receives a traditional pension gets a tax break.

After all, generally speaking, compensation from one’s employer is counted as taxable income. Any form of compensation that is exempt from taxes is a tax break. The most well-known and acknowledged of these is the exemption of employer health insurance subsidies, which have indeed been blamed for our ever-increasing health care costs as Americans are insulated from those costs.

But traditional pensions are also a form of tax break. Workers accrue pension benefits by earning service accruals while you work. It becomes their own benefit when they become vested, and it cannot be taken away. But they don’t pay taxes until they start collecting their checks at retirement. This is exactly the same sort of income-deferral as with a 401(k).

At the same time, some workers, particularly in the public sector, are required to pay contributions, similar to an employee’s own 401(k) contribution. Where these contribution requirements exist in the private sector, the tax benefit is equivalent to a Roth 401(k). The contributions are paid on an after-tax basis, but then the portion of their retirement benefit that’s determined to have been paid for by the employee contributions is tax-free. (There’s a complex calculation, laid out by the IRS, to determine this portion.) However, for public sector plans, individual employers can arrange with their employees/unions to “pick up” the contributions, so that they are treated as pre-tax contributions, in which case, again, they function in the same way as a traditional 401(k), with taxes deferred until retirement.

Now, in the same manner as a 401(k) already has limits on how much employers and employees can set aside with tax deferral, there are limits to how much an employee can receive in a traditional, tax-qualified pension plan:

In the private sector, an employee can receive up to $230,000 in tax-qualified pension benefits from a given employer (the 401(a)(17) limit), and the pension benefit can be calculated based on at most $285,000 in pay (the 415 limit).

If employers promise pension benefits above this amount, they are required to follow strict requirements around “constructive receipt” to avoid the recipients being liable for taxes right away. What’s more, they can’t guarantee them; that is, unlike qualified pension funds, any money set aside can only be in funds which are hypothetical and contingent, and can be taken by creditors in case of bankruptcy rather than being wholly protected. If they do choose to set aside money, for instance in what’s called a “Rabbi Trust” because the first such trust was established for a rabbi, the fund is protected from employers choosing to claw it back for other uses but is not truly considered to be money set-aside by the company; the contributions don’t have any special tax treatment and the investment returns over time are also taxable to the company.

In the public sector, the same limits apply (though with some grandfathering), but the restrictions are essentially toothless. In Illinois, for example, the Illinois Pension Code establishes that each state public pension system — for teachers, for state workers, for public university/college employees, for judges and for the legislators themselves — will have not just a qualified pension fund but a separate “excess benefit fund” specifically to eliminate the impact of the 415 limit. As with a private sector excess benefit plan, the benefit promises/trust fund assets are not protected in case of insolvency (though, of course, to the extent that this is a “penalty” for providing high pensions to executives, it’s much less meaningful than for a company for which bankruptcy is a real risk).

However, the state easily circumvents the requirement to pay taxes on the investment returns in their funds; here’s the language from the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund plan document:

“Income accruing to the Trust Fund in respect of the Plan shall constitute income derived from the exercise of an essential governmental function upon which the Trust shall be exempt from tax under Code Section 115, as well as Code Section 415(m)(1).”

California, likewise, has similar provisions to circumvent limits for its highly-paid employees, as reported, for instance, at the LA Times in 2018 and the Sacramento Bee in 2019, which found that over 1,000 individuals received such pensions in California.

Unfortunately, there is no convenient list of which states, if any, don’t circumvent IRS limits for public employees.

Which brings me back to 401(k) plans, and the Biden plan to swap out tax-deferral for a modest tax credit (see my original article and a follow up with more details).

Remember, again, that the claim is that the 401(k) plan is unfair because higher-income people benefit more from its tax break than lower-income people, because they are in higher tax brackets. I’ve attempted to explain that the tax break for 401(k) savings is not what it appears to be: it’s not a “tax deduction” in the same manner as one can deduct charitable contributions, for example, but the deferral has the effect of enabling taxpayers to pay taxes based on their post-retirement total effective tax rate rather than their current marginal tax rate, and exempts investment income from taxes.

And, again, the existing 401(k) system limits employee contributions to $19,500, plus a $6,500 catch-up contribution for the years just prior to retirement. Employers can also contribute $57,000 on employees’ behalf. If your employer doesn’t offer a plan and you save for retirement through an IRA, your limits are considerably lower, $6,000 plus a $1,000 catch-up option.

Which means that ambitious retirement account savers are already at a disadvantage, in terms of taxes, relative to those who have defined benefit pensions. If the Biden plan is implemented, the disadvantage of higher-income savers will be even more lopsided.

It might be tempting to say this is simply an appropriate and proper incentive for employers to (re-)offer traditional pensions. But, in an environment in which this is simply not going to happen, the real inequity is not between pension-receiving and 401(k)-receiving workers, but between public and private sector workers. And I fail to see why public sector workers should receive favorable tax code treatment.

 

December 2024 Author’s note: the terms of my affiliation with Forbes enable me to republish materials on other sites, so I am updating my personal website by duplicating a selected portion of my Forbes writing here.