More Taxes and Tuition Buy Time for the Pension Bubble
“The ‘recovery’ is largely an illusion created by the effects of zero percent interest rates, quantitative easing, and deficit spending. The asset bubbles that have been created as a result of these policies have primarily benefited the owners of stocks, bonds, and real estate (the rich), while simultaneously deterring the savings and capital investment that is needed to actually create good paying jobs and increased purchasing power.”
– Peter Schiff, EuroPacific Weekly, November 6, 2014
The question everyone should be asking, especially the managers of public employee pension funds, is how much longer can our economy run on zero percent (adj. for inflation) interest rates, quantitative easing, and deficit spending.
When asked how we unwind all of this debt and deficits in a manner that doesn’t trigger a collapse of collateral and potentially catastrophic deflation, i.e., how do we create the preconditions for sustainable economic growth, respected economics blogger Charles Hugh Smith emailed back this answer:
“Those who foisted the debt off as safe have to absorb the losses, as did those who were conned. As it stands now, the hapless taxpayers are having to make the perps and their marks whole—that is wrong, morally and financially. The US has about $90 trillion in net worth. If $10 T were wiped off the books, it would be bad for the banks and those who trusted them, but it would not sink the country.”
Which brings us to the topic of this post.
As reported on November 16th in the Sacramento Bee:
This year, UC will pay about $1.3 billion to the pension fund, about 5 percent of its overall operating budget. UC officials want the state’s general fund to pick up nearly a third of the payment, which would cover the university’s portion of pension contributions for faculty and other employees who are paid from state funds. ‘Frankly, if the state were to pay that, we would not be proposing a tuition increase,’ said Nathan Brostrom, UC’s chief financial officer. ‘That is money that could go to other resources.'”
Like nearly every public employee pension fund in the U.S., the University of California’s pension system is underfunded. According to the Sacramento Bee, the system is 79% funded, which equates to a $7.2 billion unfunded liability.
What is going to happen to the UC System’s pension fund when these asset bubbles deflate?
The precariously low funded ratio challenging America’s public employee pension systems is itself based on the dangerous assumption that we are not experiencing unsustainable asset inflation. A healthy correction would lower asset values, making the basic necessities of life – housing and energy – affordable again. But a healthy correction in asset values would render pension systems insolvent because the value of their investments – already on the brink of inadequacy – would decline further.
In the public debate over this issue, there is another assumption at work, pernicious and misleading. That assumption is that faculty on the various UC campuses are making common cause with the students by insisting that state taxpayers pick up the tab for these pensions. But there is no common cause. Beneficiaries of public sector pensions are shareholders. From funds that control nearly $4.0 trillion in investments, this privileged class of state and local government workers collect pensions that – at least in California – average four times (or more) what someone with similar compensation (and similar withholding) can expect to receive from Social Security. And unlike ordinary shareholders, when the shares held by their pension funds decline, they are empowered to force taxpayers to cover their losses.
The faculty that populate the campuses of the University of California, and by extension, every public employee who collects a pension at taxpayer – and tuition payer – expense, have interests that coincide with the one percent of the one percent, and the biggest banks, and the hedge funds, and the Wall Street firms they love to demonize. They benefit from the asset bubble that is destroying the economic aspirations of the rest of America. When financial policymakers encouraged cheap interest rates so ordinary people could borrow more than they could ever hope to pay back, just so they could own a home, shareholders – including the biggest shareholder class in the U.S., pension funds – profited from the debt-fueled economic growth. When asset bubbles rendered a middle class lifestyle unattainable to most Americans, the public sector exempted themselves through automatic cost-of-living increases and enhanced pension benefits.
The solution to the University of California’s money crunch is to suspend cost-of-living increases, increase payroll withholding for pension benefits, and lower pension benefit formulas. Only then will the people who teach California’s youth truly be making common cause with their students.
As it is, the roadblocks to sustainable economic growth are those who benefit from debt fueled asset bubbles – super rich shareholders and their fully co-opted partners, government workers.
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Ed Ring is the executive director of the California Policy Center.
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