Welcome to the latest edition of This Week in Pensions! As we do most weeks, we have gathered the best stories about pensions and retirement security from the previous week. This is the news you need to know in the fight for a secure retirement.
Here are this week’s top stories:
- Blame Amazon for America’s underfunded public pensions by Bailey Childers: writing in The Hill, NPPC’s Executive Director points out that many of the states rushing to give lavish tax breaks to Amazon for their HQ2 also claim that they don’t have enough money to fully fund their pensions each year. A recent series of reports found that, in many states, the annual cost of corporate tax breaks and subsidies far exceeds the annual cost of public pensions.
- Teachers Are Best Served by Traditional Pensions by Tyler Bond: writing for The Huffington Post, NPPC’s Bond summarizes the findings of four recent reports on public pensions for teachers. These reports add to a growing mountain of evidence that defined benefit pensions provide the most secure retirement for teachers.
- Stop messing with public employees’ pensions in Kansas by Michael Scribner: the chairman of Keeping the Kansas Promise, a coalition dedicated to protecting pensions in Kansas, argues that the state has repeatedly failed in its obligation to support the retirement security of public employees by not making its contributions to the pension fund. “And quite frankly, we’ve had enough.”
- Bevin administration releases data showing Kentucky teachers wealthier under “Keeping the Promise” plan: late last week, Gov. Matt Bevin released his long-awaited legislation for addressing public pensions in the Bluegrass State. As expected, the legislation proposes harsh cuts in pension benefits for working families. This week, while promoting the legislation, the governor’s office released data that ludicrously claims a teacher under the governor’s proposed defined contribution plan could not only save millions of dollars for retirement, but also leave more than $800,000 to their family upon their death. This claim flies in the face of all evidence that shows defined contribution plans fail to provide a secure retirement for working families. As the debate continues in Kentucky, it is critical to have an honest debate and not believe the fanciful and completely unrealistic claims promoted by the governor’s office.
- Bevin: Opponents of pension plan do not have ‘sophistication’ to know what’s at stake by Daniel Desrochers: as if promoting wild and unbelievable claims about what his proposed legislation would do is not enough, Gov. Bevin also felt the need to insult critics of his pension plan this week. Sadly, this continues a long history of the governor insulting and belittling those who disagree with him. Whatever the governor may think of pension advocates, we must continue to be a reasonable voice working to protect pensions for public employees across Kentucky.
Be sure to check back in the weeks ahead for the latest news in the fight for a secure retirement!
