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:
- Defined benefit pension plans help retain teacher talent by Paula Aven Gladych: Employee Benefit Advisor covers a recent report from the National Institute on Retirement Security. The report found that defined benefit pensions help keep experienced teachers in the classroom. We covered the release of this report and a few others on this blog previously.
- This is how changes in pensions can lead to changes in worker behavior by Alicia Munnell: the director of the Center for Retirement Research considers the impact of pension changes in Dallas and Rhode Island. In both places, negative changes to pension benefits had unanticipated effects on the workforce, as public employees responded to the attacks on their retirement benefits. These workforce impacts are often ignored by anti-pension ideologues when they push for harmful pension cuts.
- NCPERS Analysis Shows Public Pension Plans Consistently Meet Obligations by Business Wire: a new report from the National Conference of Public Employee Retirement Systems finds that over the past quarter-century, contributions and investment earnings by 6,000 public pension plans exceeded benefit obligations in all but four years. According to Hank Kim, executive director of NCPERS, “Our analysis demonstrates that pension plans can tolerate ups and downs in the markets and still meet their current obligations. While funding ratios are an important actuarial tool, they are not a proxy for a plan’s ability to pay benefits here and now.”
- Bevin administration refuses to release report on pension bill’s cost to taxpayers by Tom Loftus: this week the governor of Kentucky refused to publicly release a report on the impact of his proposed pension legislation on the Kentucky Retirement Systems. A separate report on the impact of Bevin’s legislation on the Kentucky Teachers Retirement System found that the proposed changes would increase costs for taxpayers by $4.4 billion over twenty years.
- Bevin Asks For Redo Of Negative Report On Pension Plan by Ryland Barton: continuing with this story, the Bevin administration has now demanded that the independent actuarial firm that analyzed the changes to the teacher pension plan redo its analysis. Apparently Bevin doesn’t want the public to know the true cost of his harmful proposed pension changes.
We’ll be taking next week off for the Thanksgiving holiday, but be sure to check back in the weeks ahead for the latest news in the fight for a secure retirement!
