Word: pension
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...always had more interesting - and controversial - things to say than your average retirement-policy wonk. An economist who moved this year from the University of Notre Dame to the New School for Social Research in New York City, she has railed for years against the decline of the traditional pension. She recently wrote a book subtitled The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them; the less contentious main title is When I'm Sixty-Four...
...other defined-contribution retirement plans - they have high fees, for one - Ghilarducci didn't think she was courting controversy. "I was saying things that seemed completely milquetoast," she recalls. Ghilarducci did bring up a bold proposal to replace the 401(k) with a mandatory, government-run pension plan and suggested that Congress immediately allow retirees to swap 401(k)s battered by the stock market's collapse for monthly payouts from the government. But she had floated both ideas before, to little effect. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...Therein lies the problem, or problems. Unlike pensions, 401(k)s are voluntary, and many workers either don't participate or don't set aside enough money to give them a shot at a comfortable retirement. Those who do save enough often bungle their investment choices. Those who choose well pay higher investment fees generally than pension funds do. Even participants in the best-run, lowest-cost retirement funds face the risk that the market will tank - as it has done this year - when they're close to retirement. At retirement comes another issue: pensions insure against the risk that...
...Ford's and Chrysler's current employees will no longer be eligible for postretirement health benefits. For the automakers, the costly transition is worth it, because it eliminates one of the major uncertainties they have faced over the years - the soaring cost of health care. GM's combined pension and retiree-health-care costs run $7 billion annually and have cost GM more than $103 billion over the past 15 years, according to GM chairman and CEO Richard Wagoner. Ford's health-care expenses for both active and retired employees now run $2.2 billion, a figure that will drop significantly...
...private sector," says Blaine Bos, a consultant for Mercer based in Minneapolis, Minn. Instead, government agencies have to battle bit by bit for benefit trims that employees can collectively counter by marshaling great passion. In 2005 when California's Governor Schwarzenegger tried to radically reform the state's expensive pension plan, he met a firestorm of protest from unions, and ultimately backed down...