- Sarah Krouse discusses the $4 Trillion Pension Hole in her recent WSJ article.
- Ted Dabrowski & John Klingner highlight Chicago's $125,000/household pension debt
I think these articles demonstrate the magnitude of the public pension funding gap at both the macro and household levels. Even those of us without public employee pensions will most likely be affected whether through future tax increases or decreases in public services as municipalities and states struggle to meet their pension obligations.
While I think it is easy to identify the problem, solving the issue will definitely be a challenge. Personally, I think the long term solution is to reduce future pension obligations by transitioning from a defined benefits to a defined contributions plan. I think both the employer (taxpayer) and the employee would be better off with a 401k style account with a large annual employer contribution. This will prevent politicians from making future pension promises to buy current votes and will eliminate the compounding effect of under-funding pension funds and overly optimistic investment returns currently plaguing pension funds. It will also protect the employee from future benefit cuts as states and municipalities are unable to meet current pension obligations.
While it may appear that this proposed solution will transfer investment risk from the employer to the employee, I would argue that the employee has always been on the hook for lower than expected investment returns. I'd also expect that through tools at discount broker's such as Charles Schwab, Vanguard, Wealthfront and Betterment that employees could get similar returns for lower fees than employer managed pension funds.
Please use comment sections to push back at my proposed solution and share other interesting articles that pertain to this topic.