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It’s well-known that public pension funds took a major hit during the financial crisis. We’ve written before about the steep drop in funding levels from 2008 – 2009 when the economy was crashing due to Wall Street greed and incompetence.…
Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas is at it again. If you’ve followed our blog over the last couple of years, as well as the news, you know that Kansas is in fiscal disarray. In 2011, when he first took office,…
It’s still early in 2017 and state legislative sessions haven’t even begun in every state yet. John Arnold, however, is already on the attack. Arnold, the anti-pension billionaire and former trader at the disgraced Enron, who has spent over $50…
President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos to be the Secretary of Education in his upcoming administration. If that name sounds familiar, it should. The DeVos family is a major advocate for gutting public pensions in Michigan. Should…
A recent report from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College looked at state and local pension plans and whether there had been changes to those plans since the financial crisis. The report’s authors found that three-fourths of state…
In an article published by the Wall Street Journal this week, the creators of the 401(k) reflected on the consequences of the product they promoted. The takeaway: many of the early advocates of 401(k)s now regret the “revolution” they helped…
All in all, 2016 was a good year for public pensions. States and cities chose to protect and preserve their defined benefit pension plans and the city of Palm Beach, FL, moved back to a defined benefit plan from an…
Around this time of year, many children- and some adults- are very concerned about whether they made it onto the naughty or nice list of a jolly old man who lives up north. Here at NPPC, we also keep a…
Often when we talk about public pensions, we focus on the individual teacher, firefighter, or other public employee who earns a secure retirement through their pension. That is certainly one of the best features of defined benefit pensions: workers know…
As we’ve written about on this blog, the prevalence of defined benefit pensions has declined in the private sector and this has hurt working families. In the public sector, though, defined benefit pensions remain quite common. According to a recent…
In August, we wrote about the decline of traditional pensions in the private sector. One of the major reasons for private companies abandoning pensions was a series of laws beginning in the 1980s and culminating in the Pension Protection Act…
Anti-pension ideologues in the Michigan legislature have wanted to gut public pensions there for a long time, especially pensions for teachers. This year, they attacked teachers’ retirement security during the lame duck legislative session, but they were defeated by the…