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Welcome back to This Week in Pensions! We took a break last week, but we are back with the news you need to know about pensions and retirement security. As always, we’ve gathered the best stories from the previous week about the fight for a secure retirement.

Here are this week’s top stories:

  • Pension Envy: Lessons From Well-Managed Plans by Liz Farmer: Governing’s finance reporter covers the truth that many public pension plans are well-funded and pay modest benefits. As she says, “it’s wrong to assume they’re all a failure. In fact, there are many plans across the country that are humming along fine.”
  • The myth about the pension crisis in Alabama by David Bronner: the head of the Retirement Systems of Alabama defends Alabama’s public pensions from cries of “crisis” and “reform” by pension opponents.
  • Disappearing pensions hurt U.S. economy as well as workers by Michael Molinski: writing in USA Today, a former financial reporter discusses how the private sector abandoning pensions has hurt the U.S. economy as a whole.
  • Don’t Penalize Poor, Retired Puerto Ricans by Bailey Childers: NPPC’s executive director argues that Congress has a moral imperative to protect the pensions of Puerto Rico’s retirees in debt negotiations. Responding to an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, she points out that Puerto Rico’s retirees did nothing wrong and should not have their retirement security threatened in order to pay vulture hedge funds.
  • Why we must protect the retirement security of Puerto Ricans by Bailey Childers: continuing with the plight of Puerto Rico’s retirees, Childers writes in the Hill that Congress must establish protections for Puerto Rico’s pensions in legislation that they pass to address the commonwealth’s debt crisis.
  • The dire US pension funding gap is a politically driven estimate by Hank Kim: the executive director of NCPERS writes in the Financial Times that recent claims of a large pension funding gap are overblown. From the piece: “Constantly fiddling with the numbers, as opponents seem intent upon doing, is a tactic designed to make the real issue of pension underfunding seem impossibly large and unsolvable. It is neither.”

Be sure to check back here next Friday for the latest news update.