The $2 Trillion Public Pension Hole and What You Can Do About It

Mish

The cover story of Barron's is on public pensions, an issue I have been railing about for years, and heatedly so for several months. Please consider The $2 Trillion Hole.

LIKE A CALIFORNIA WILDFIRE, populist rage burns over bloated executive compensation and unrepentant avarice on Wall Street.

Deserving as these targets may or may not be, most Americans have ignored at their own peril a far bigger pocket of privilege -- the lush pensions that the 23 million active and retired state and local public employees, from cops and garbage collectors to city managers and teachers, have wangled from taxpayers.

Some 80% of these public employees are beneficiaries of defined-benefit plans under which monthly pension payments are guaranteed, no matter how stocks and other volatile assets backing the retirement plans perform. In contrast, most of the taxpayers footing the bill for these public-employee benefits (participants' contributions to these plans are typically modest) have been pushed by their employers into far less munificent defined-contribution plans and suffered the additional indignity of seeing their 401(k) accounts shrivel in the recent bear market in stocks.

Most public employees, if they hang around to retirement, can count on pensions equal to 75% to 90% of their pay in their highest-earning years. And many public employees earn even more in retirement than their best year's base compensation as a result of "spiking" their last year's income by working ferocious amounts of overtime and rolling in years of unused sick and vacation days into their final-year pay computation.

The $2 Trillion Public Pension Hole and What You Can Do About It