Pension Reform Requires Mutual Empathy, not Enmity

Edward Ring

Director, Water and Energy Policy

Edward Ring
October 20, 2015

Pension Reform Requires Mutual Empathy, not Enmity

Attending a high school reunion after more than a few decades ought to be a memorable experience for anyone. Hopefully the occasion is filled with warmth and remembrance, rekindled friendships, stories and laughs. But as our lives develop and we build our adult networks based on shared values and common professions, a high school reunion offers something else; a unique opportunity to meet people we knew very well and still care about, whose lives all went in completely different directions.

My high school classmates chose a diverse assortment of careers. Some became engineers, some went into sales, some are entrepreneurs; some work in high-tech, some in aerospace, others in construction. And some are teachers, some are police officers, and some are firefighters. Without any exceptions I could observe, all of them made conscientious choices, all of them worked hard, all of them were responsible with their savings and investments. And now they’ve reached the age where whatever retirement plans they made are unlikely to change much.

How to ensure government pensions are not blown up by the next sustained market downturn is a complex challenge, complicated further by ideological divisiveness and political opportunism. On one side are powerful financial special interests in the form of the pension systems, and their government union allies. On the other side are poorly organized taxpayer activists whose grassroots strength, combined with fiscal reality, attract support from increasing numbers of local and state politicians. But caught in the middle are the people who served in government jobs, the overwhelming majority of whom did those jobs well, and have earned the right to retire with dignity. It’s personal.

Figuring out how to make government retirement benefits financially sustainable should be part of a bigger conversation, which is how all Americans are going to have the ability to retire with dignity. It is part of a conversation even bigger than that – how to nurture sustainable economic growth while coping with an aging population, environmentalist considerations, globalization, debt/GDP ratios at historic highs, and mushrooming new technologies that present unprecedented potential to eliminate human jobs. All of these mega-trends are this generation’s challenge, all of them are urgent, all of them are personal.

It’s easy to solve all of these challenges if you are willing to ignore reality and hew to an ideological pole-star. Libertarian answers to social and economic policy issues inevitably advocate privatization. Socialist theorists inevitably advocate state ownership. But both of these ideologies, in their most orthodox forms, are utopian. Libertarians envision a stateless, humane society based on personal liberty and private ownership. Socialists envision a stateless, humane society based on common ownership. If these extremes are so absurd, why is the center so uninviting?

It’s a long way from Silicon Valley to utopia, but in that fabled land, anchored by what was only referred to as San Jose back when we were high school students there, thoughtful futurists abound. Some think we shall all become independent contractors, linked by technology to virtual employment opportunities all over the world. They believe secure full time jobs will wither away entirely, and everyone will thrive as free agents in a wired world. Others think automation will eliminate so many jobs, and create so much abundance, that guaranteeing a minimum income to everyone will be feasible and necessary, whether they work or not. The conversation taking place among the Silicon Valley elite regarding the political economy of our future is helping to define that future as much as their innovative new products. It’s a conversation worth listening to without ideological blinders.

My classmates who chose careers in public service, just like my classmates who pursued careers in the private sector, are starting to retire. Just like everyone else – our friends, our families, our neighbors – they want answers, not ideology. They want constructive solutions, not controversial schemes. Is there enough room in the political center to permit a conversation that sticks to facts and practical solutions, or will the professional chorus of perennial opponents crush them, abetted by all those millions who are comforted by inflexible ideologies?

One ideologically impure, centrist way to save defined benefits would be to borrow concepts from Social Security. Reformed defined benefits would be (1) awarded according to progressive formulas, where the more someone makes, the less the pension benefit is as a percent of their final salary, (2) there is a benefit ceiling which no individual pension can exceed, (3) pension contributions in the form of employee withholding can be increased without commensurate increases to overall salary, (4) annual pension accrual multipliers, going forward for active workers, can be reduced depending on the system’s financial health, and (5) when necessary, pension benefits to existing retirees can be reduced, in order to maintain the overall financial health of the system. Often that can be as little as skipping a COLA.

When political professionals, volunteer activists, policymakers, commentators, analysts, or anyone else influencing the pension debate speak on the topic, they should imagine the following situation: With every word, they are looking into the eyes of two close friends or family members, two people nearing retirement, one of them about to collect a government pension, the other a taxpayer who will rely on Social Security supplemented by a lifetime of personal savings. People who didn’t create the financial challenges we collectively face. People we love.

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Ed Ring is the executive director of the California Policy Center.

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