POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

Pension news roundup: June 6

• Highly unlikely to get a pension bailout:church plans

  I feel a little sorry for them, but church plans generally never had enough people in the pool to justify having a separate pension plan. If employers really wanted to provide a lifelong income, they should've bought annuities for their employees....but under pension funding rules, pensions look cheaper than annuities. Anyway, some church groups do not have this problem, b/c they did do what I recommend above [with TIAA-CREF]

• Suing as a negotiation tactic: Baltimore public safety unions bringing city into federal court-they say the issue is that the city chronically underfunded the pension plan [I have no doubt this is true], and thus... they should be able to negotiate to keep their cushy benefits.

  Um, right. Ok, if they really cared about the underfunding, they would've been suing 2 years into the underfunding, not after years and years. They're only suing this time is because in prior times that underfunding wasn't accompanied by benefits cuts [on paper... b/c the underfunding was really benefits cuts in fact]

• Marching as a negotiation tactic: Greek public unions are revolting! [I'd say].

  1. They couldn't even get 0.1% of their membership to show up at a protest in the nation's capital. Pathetic.
  2. Understand this, guys: you have no leverage. Germans who were already working til age 70 don't give a shit about 50-year-old hairdressers' "right" to an early retirement due to their years of exposure to black hair dye.

• Speaking of unions freaking out b/c they're losing leverage: An article supposedly about general state pension problems, but is really about Chris Christie.

  As a New Yorker, I never thought I'd say I was envious of NJ. I love that fat man.

• Pay-as-you-go public pensions in the UK-well, U.S. state pensions aren't at this point....yet.
• California pension delays asset return assumption recommendation - more on this another time. I'm waiting for the GASB to release its new valuation recs.

Meep

Meep is a member of the Irish Catholic mafia, having a suspiciously high number of green-eyed, red-haired friends. While she doesn’t have red hair herself [except when she goes into the sun (rare for any vampire)], she does have green eyes. She’s a raving Papist and is a life actuary on the side [i.e., she counts dead people]. An amateur pain-in-the-ass [willing to go pro!], she likes covering retirement, mortality, math, and education issues.