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:
- Panic Attack: The overheated rhetoric around the future of public pensions obscures fundamental issues by Tyler Bond: NPPC’s Program Manager writes in Voice, a quarterly magazine focused on public policy issues in Minnesota. Contributing to a special issue focused on public pensions, Bond argues that the rhetoric about public pension funding is often overheated and obscures a more important problem: the retirement security crisis facing the United States.
- Texas teachers’ pay is average. But their pensions are among the lowest in the country by Alex Samuels: the state of Texas pays its teachers reasonably well, which is how it is able to lure teachers from neighboring states like Oklahoma. When it comes to pension benefits for teachers, however, Texas is less generous. The overwhelming majority of Texas teachers do not participate in Social Security and the state of Texas only contributes 6.8 percent towards the teacher pension plan, much less than in other non-Social Security states.
- Kentucky’s pension reform lawsuit kicks off with Bevin trying to oust Beshear by Morgan Watkins: as soon as Governor Bevin signed into law SB 151, the stinking, harmful, pension-gutting bill, Kentucky Attorney General Beshear sued to stop the legislation from taking effect. Now, Bevin’s lawyers are trying to get Beshear removed from the case.
We’ll be off next week, but be sure to check back in the weeks ahead for the latest news in the fight for a secure retirement!
