The states have promised big pension and retirement benefits to their employees without putting aside money to pay for them.
It is estimated that 100 percent of union plan participants and more than 99 percent of non-union plan participants will receive the full amount of normal retirement pension benefits that have already vested.
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Similarly, the NHLPA could say that it is only willing to accept a lower share of HRI if additional retirement and pension benefits are negotiated for players.
Over the decades I have observed that pension funds that provide retirement benefits to state workers almost always exert an alarming influence over the reporting of their transgressions at the local level.
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They included postponing the retirement age and reducing pension benefits.
If they dared jump in mid-career to another firm, they'd lose a lot of what they had earned in retirement benefits, because pension credits were not adjusted for inflation.
To be sure, 457 and 403(b) investors generally are also participants in public pensions which will be their retirement mainstays, but pension benefits are being trimmed and, I predict, will continue to be.
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And lately, some companies have been amending their traditional pension plans to offer pre-retirement survivor benefits to domestic partners, she says.
Raising salaries or making legislators full-time isn't politically popular, so lawmakers instead arrange the pension system to provide greater benefits in retirement.
Mark Warshawsky is a pension expert who directs retirement research at the benefits firm Towers Watson and was a senior official at the Treasury Department from 2004-2006.
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He attributes this to several factors: the abolition of mandatory retirement in 1986, changes to the government pension that raised benefits for those retiring after 65, and the decline in defined-contribution plans which penalised late retirement in financial terms.
Corporate America and the financial wizards behind the past three decades of so-called retirement innovations, most notably titans of the pension benefits consulting and mutual fund 401(k) industries, are down-playing just how bad things are already and how much worse they are going to get.
The union won't want to give up any of its pension programs, with extra early retirement money, and 65% benefits for a retiree's surviving spouse.
After all, they may have to compete for jobs with a new generation of educated workers from rising economies like China and India, save for a retirement without a traditional pension and lower Social Security and Medicare benefits, and face higher tax rates to pay our growing national debt.
While many retirees from the private sector have seen retirement benefits weakened in recent years, retirees at public pension funds largely have avoided such cuts.
Mercer, the agency contends, made multiple errors as the state's actuarial consultant when it estimated the amounts that two of the state's retirement plans needed to set aside for health care and pension benefits.
Of the more than 34, 000 workers who participated in GM s accelerated attrition program, most took early retirement, which means they will receive their full pension and retiree health care benefits.
Other large tax expenditure provisions that I did not include in this experiment include the earned income tax credit, the child credit, the exclusion of employer provided and self-employed health benefits, and the present law treatment of various forms of retirement income and pension plans.
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Were Congress to raise the retirement age to, say, 70 years old, this would provide all the leverage these companies need to raise the retirement age in their own corporate pension plans allowing the companies to defer paying the benefits they promised their workers and provide more time for these companies to deal with these underfunded plans.
The national debate regarding public pension woes to date has focused almost exclusively upon inadequate funding of these retirement plans and the supposedly unsustainable benefits promised to workers.
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As public pension benefits continue to be whittled away across the country, 457s become a more important part of the retirement package offered to government employees.
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People who worked for the state, in state-owned companies or in state-approved collectives, enjoyed cradle-to-grave benefits ranging from housing, education and health care to a generous pension scheme, with an official retirement age of 55 for men and 50 for women for manual workers (but five years more for white-collar workers) and a replacement rate of about 80% of final salary.
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