The choice is raising taxes, reducing spending elsewhere, or demanding workers give up the pensions they were promised. Somehow I doubt anyone is going to agree to pay more in taxes to cover pensions in their state or city. After all, why should the government keep its promises (especially if it means we have to pay for it)?
There is also simple attentuation. Workers have to pay more and for longer to be vested. They will receive a bit less, plans will be a little less generous. It has already happened in the NY teacher pension system. The sky isn't falling.
Does stability in retirement add enough value to society and the economy for it to be a good investment? I've been an adult less than a decade, so without a return why should I pay for the promises of my predecessors? So many questions.
In my view, yes, for at least a couple of reasons. First, because people survive whether you want them to or not, and driving old people into poverty will end up burdening you in some other way, probably worse. We pay a lot for not having a decent safety net.
Second, old people vote. If you drive a political wedge between the young and old, I can't say what will happen, but it won't involve the young ending up on top.
Third, retirees are a huge consumer group, and also a non-obvious but important source of support for families.
In fact, telling young people that they will see nothing of social security is a propaganda position intended to drive that wedge.
> First, because people survive whether you want them to or not, and driving old people into poverty will end up burdening you in some other way, probably worse. We pay a lot for not having a decent safety net.
You're falsely trying to paint the choice as only between driving retirees into poverty and paying the full pension.
I certainly won't be receiving 60-100% of my maximum salary forever after I retire, and I won't need nearly that much in order to not be in poverty. And IMO it borders on unjust to underfund a pension with tax dollars while those workers are working, then force younger workers that weren't even old enough to vote when those benefits were created to now shoulder the burden.
Why can't we cut pensions, without eliminating them? Why can't the state switch from defined benefit to defined contribution plans, like practically ever other non-government employee gets?
> If you drive a political wedge between the young and old, I can't say what will happen, but it won't involve the young ending up on top.
This is true only up to a point. The old aren't exactly going to be the ones who will win if the economy collapses or the country descends into chaos, are they?
Also young people can just leave if the economy is just feeding on them.
I left the UK partly because between insane housing prices and paying for the triple-locked pensions of the elderly - the economy has little to offer young people and there are better opportunities elsewhere.
I actually think the answer is simpler and more immediate than that. The government made a promise. If the government does not keep that promise, can it be trusted with other obligations?
In fact, this problem of unfunded pensions has impacted municipal credit ratings and wound up costing taxpayers more in higher interest rates than they would have had to pay in higher taxes to stabilize the pension funds.
It makes no difference, because the promise was already made and now you have to choose between (a) destroying your government's credit rating or (b) making good on the promise. Complain all you want, but that's just the situation we find ourselves in.
In the short term, sure. In the longer term, when increased taxes and decreased services impact the average person, these promises will be renegotiated.
Because the government existed before you and will exist after you’re gone. It exists (in part) to enable continuity of society, and that is the compact you agree to by remaining a resident/citizen.
Promise, in this case, is a nicer version of the word debt. The government that made the promise is just an abstraction or buffer for the people making the promises, the people voting for them, and the people benefiting from those decisions. Note how current stakeholders (me and you) had no say on a decision that they would be (potentially) responsible for.
Thomas Jefferson's view of deficit finance was that one generation has no right to impose its debts on the next. He would have refused deficit spending that would not be completely paid back within 19 years (roughly, a generation).
I don't think many people listened to him on that. Here we are.
I think we do have the right to ask this question. We should have the option of denying that the previous generation ever had the right to impose this upon us.
At the very least, we should learn from this, recognize these types of short-sighted promises for what they are, and reject them when we see them. This is one big way we can be better than our forefathers.
> The government made a promise. If the government does not keep that promise, can it be trusted with other obligations?
This is way too absolute and simplistic. Past governments can make bad policy. Past governments can be corrupt or make decisions based on personal interest against the public or incomplete or bad information at the time. The obligation of future governments has to be balanced with whether the past government instituted good policy or not.
But even when a city says to unionized workers, you can keep your pension but new hires get moved to a 401k, the unions say no. See San Jose as an example
Well, what exactly do you expect? Unions do not like having some members receive wildly different benefits from others because that breaks their unity. Gradual phase-ins are needed if you are going to move to a defined-contribution plan; see e.g. the introduction of 401k plans for NYC subway workers, which has been slow and mostly agreeable to the union.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the problem is not merely that future pension obligations for new hires might not be funded. In some cases the problem is immediate or very near-term -- pension funds have become so depleted in some states and cities that retirees may not receive their checks, and in some cases people have been forced to accept less than they were promised (see the article for examples).
> But even when a city says to unionized workers, you can keep your pension but new hires get moved to a 401k, the unions say no.
Well, yeah, because then 5 years down the road, when the city tries to shift pension contributions from the city to covered employees on the defined benefit plan, newer employees have no incentive to support the older employees and the employer can split the union. Which is why unions resist anything that gives different covered employees radically different contract interests.
I feel wary of doing this because I feel this is what's going to happen with my IRAs. I was promised that if I pay my taxes now I don't have to pay them when I'm old, but supposed the next generation decides they want to change the rules. Do I just pound sand and give up?
Pensioners were given a promise and now we're changing the rules. It feels wrong even if the promise was unrealistic.
Just for clarification... you described a Roth. Usually, when someone says "IRA" without further qualification it would be assumed to be a traditional.
> Pensioners were given a promise and now we're changing the rules.
There is a slight difference between the two situations you describe. That being that the promises being made to the unions were not being done by disinterested parties. Public services unions are notorious for being some of the largest donors to state and local candidates. The negotiators on the management side of the table are deeply beholden to the unions and have no personal interest in paying the obligations they are agreeing to, it's all put on the tax payer.
Pensioners voted for free money at a cost to future generations, unsurprisingly future generations we're not interested in giving greedy old timers free money.
Yes! Some city or state is going to go bankrupt because of this, and the people affected are going to sue. It will take at least a decade to work up to the Supreme Court, who will find (no matter WHAT the liberal/conservative makeup at the time) that, surprise, surprise, the government is NOT legally obligated to pay out the benefits they said they would. Various governments will try to implement various forms of austerity to make it work, and former employees are just going to have to suck it up.
Don't worry though. This exact same thing is also happening to Social Security, which will crash around the same time, or shortly after, so everyone working now will get the shaft.
Of course, the latest date I've seen (2038) is almost exactly when I should have been eligible to start drawing on it.
Well, let's just say that somehow what you are saying is correct. How comfortable would you be investing in a long-term muni bond after that? If you were a contractor, how would you feel about working on a long-term project for a state or local government? Who would want to work for the government when there is no way to trust that any of the benefits will materialized (other than the salary; then again, who knows?)
It's not just former employees that will suffer. Everyone suffers when states have to pay higher interest rates on their bonds because of poor credit ratings (that's what bankruptcy does to a state) or have to pay more for workers and contractors. Everyone will have to pay higher taxes and everyone will receive less from the government.
I cannot understand the logic of not making good on government obligations. You can take the position that the government should stop promising pensions, but how can anyone think it is a good idea for the government to fail to pay for the pensions it already promised people (or, frankly, any other promise the government made)?
This is exactly why people have been screaming about this problem for a couple of decades.
It is going to be HUGE and do incredible damage. Retirees will be hurt catastrophically, costs of government borrowing will skyrocket, programs will be cut massively, workers will abandon government.
The issue is that the costs of meeting the prior obligations will be completely impossible. States, cities, and school districts will go bankrupt, massive numbers of people will be fired, and taxes will go up while service goes down.
Unfortunately the politics prevent a fix today and prevented a fix 10 or 20 years ago when it would have been much cheaper. The fix will happen in 10 to 20 years and it's going to be horrific.
Happened in the private sector. Most millennials don't trust pensions and prefer 401k. As you are in control of the money and there isn't much that could be changed unfavorably in 50 years.
I am not sure millennials don't trust pensions; I think we never had the choice. It is also wrong to assume you are in control of your 401k, since for most people a 401k will be invested in mutual funds managed by the same businesses that manage pension funds. Some of those funds have absurd expense ratios that erode retirement savings.
A government changing its mind about pensions could easily change its mind about the favorable tax treatment of 401ks. Or go even further and follow HN's exhortations to implement a wealth tax. Upper-middle-class retirement funds are a huge component of inequality; reducing that can only be good, right?
You pay tax when withdrawing funds from 401k. Worst case they'll remove the 401k and force everyone to migrate to a Roth IRA. Which is the same as the status quo...aka not that bad.
As for Roth IRA. I don't trust the government to honor their end of the deal. I can see them taxing withdrawals for the top 10% in the future.
> Some city or state is going to go bankrupt because of this,
States cannot go bankrupt, without a change to federal law. Cities can and have, and pensions have already been addressed in that context. It's not a new question.
> and the people affected are going to sue. It will take at least a decade to work up to the Supreme Court, who will find (no matter WHAT the liberal/conservative makeup at the time) that, surprise, surprise, the government is NOT legally obligated to pay out the benefits they said they would.
It's already been established that pensions can be cut in bankruptcy, so, yeah, that's not even a question.
> Various governments will try to implement various forms of austerity to make it work,
They already are to prevent running into the major crises (e.g., recent pension funding requirements reforms in California.)
> Don't worry though. This exact same thing is also happening to Social Security, which will crash around the same time, or shortly after, so everyone working now will get the shaft.
Social Security won't crash; even with scenarios projecting Trust Fund exhaustion it still ends up paying at worst something like 2/3 of eligible benefits out or current revenues out to the limit of projections.
> It's already been established that pensions can be cut in bankruptcy, so, yeah, that's not even a question.
Minor nitpick, but it’s in Illinois’ state constitution that pensions cannot be reduced. Republicans want to change the constitution to remove this rule, but Illinois is an overwhelmingly Democratic state so that’s never going to happen. It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out.
> Minor nitpick, but it’s in Illinois’ state constitution that pensions cannot be reduced.
Major nitpick, but in the event of municipal bankruptcy (the context of the store you responded too), federal bankruptcy law trumps state law—including the state constitution—because Supremacy Clause. The bankrupt entity doesn't cut pensions, the bankruptcy court does.
A major problem is that this is a case of I'll be gone, you'll be gone.
The union leaders and the politicians - typically in their 50 to 70s - who made the promises will be dead by the time the 25 year old new hires try to collect their pensions at 55 or 65. The incentives are all sorts of screwed up and it's very difficult to create a healthy set of constraints for this kind of bargaining.
> ... create a healthy set of constraints for this kind of bargaining.
They should simply put the burden of new obligations (debt or pension guarantees) on individuals rather than on the city. If you live in a municipality when they take on a bond for a stadium, or agree to pension payments, then you pay those debts regardless of where you have moved to. Or put the obligations on property, so people have an interest in not burdening themselves or their investments.
QE is not something municipal governments can do, so it is irrelevant to this discussion. Since you brought it up, it is worth mentioning that QE actually contributed to the pension shortfall because pension funds suffer when interest rates are low.
Quantitative easing was not for banks. Also, the bailouts to which you refer were not free money, they were loans with low interest rates that have been paid back.
The pensions don't have enough money so easy access to debt does nothing to help them solve that problem.
> Somehow I doubt anyone is going to agree to pay more in taxes to cover pensions in their state or city. After all, why should the government keep its promises (especially if it means we have to pay for it)?
I agree with it but then again I'm not opposed to paying taxes. Why shouldn't we provide for the retirement of our workforce?
Boomers and their parents took out wayyy more than they put in. Whenever it has been time to pass the cup around for other groups, they haven't been what I would call generous. Look at the funding difference between Medicare and Medicaid if you want a feel for it.
Given all of that, I'm not too excited about propping-up their pension shortfalls.
I agree with you. I think it's a bit dangerous to start splitting boomers out though. All it's going to do is create division between young and old resulting in defunding for both groups.
Between this, Iraq/Afghanistan, China's ascent, and global warming, defunding (by circumstance rather than choice) is probably inevitable at this point.
