Center for Business & Public Policy
Collaborative blog exploring the relationship between market forces and public policy.

I am writing this piece the morning of December 3, the first day of a special session of the Illinois General Assembly.  I have little faith that anything I say will shake the legislative leaders from their plan – a delicate political compromised worked out behind closed doors in recent weeks.  But I am taking the time to write anyway because even a small chance of influencing the debate seems worthwhile, given how much is at stake.

I co-wrote an op-ed in the Champaign News-Gazette nine days ago expressing my deep concern about how the proposed reform would affect higher education in Illinois – especially our ability to retain our best people.  Most of my worst fears in that op-ed were realized when the text of S.B. 1 was released yesterday.  In the interim, I was quoted in several news articles as reporters were looking for insight as bits and pieces of information leaked out of Springfield.  In one article, I was quoted as saying that if I had to choose between this reform, and doing nothing, I would do this reform.  That surprised many of my colleagues, so another motivation for this piece is to clarify this statement.

The easy answer is to say that if I had to choose between dying and having both of my legs amputated, I would choose the latter.  But this should not be interpreted as suggesting that I think leg amputation is necessarily a good idea, particularly when equally effective but far less damaging treatments are available.

Similarly, we need pension reform in Illinois.  Doing nothing is simply not an option, at least in the medium and long run.  So I do believe that bad reform may, on net, be better than no reform.  But that assumes bad reform is our only option.

S.B. 1 is bad pension reform because it will lead to an exodus of top intellectual talent from our universities.  (More details below.)

Is it our only option?  From any reasonable perspective – for example, actuarial, economic, financial, etc. – the answer is clearly “no.”  There are many ways to closing the fiscal gap, and S.B. 1 is only one, and particularly flawed at that.

But from a political perspective, the answer is harder.  I worry greatly that this may be our only option, given how dysfunctional our state political system is.  If it really is S.B. 1 or nothing, then I might hold my nose and support it, knowing that universities will have to go to extraordinary lengths to undo some of the extensive damage this will cause.  That would come at a steep price – during the transition, we will lose some of our very best people.  It could literally destroy the pre-eminence that has taken decades for the University of Illinois to achieve.

I am not a political scientist.  But I do understand incentives, and I have followed the politics of Illinois pension reform closely for many years.  And I was struck by a particularly insightful question that one of my politically-experienced and insightful friends asked me: “What leads you to expect that if you could and did kill this bill, that those same politicians would be likely to produce a better outcome the next time?”  (I have edited the question a bit).  My answer is that we should be able to do better. But I am not sure we really can.

Even so, this reform is so poorly designed that, as a pension expert and employee of the University of Illinois, I feel compelled to oppose it.

Because the General Assembly may vote as early as today, I don’t have time to go into a lot of detail or polish my writing.  Nor do I have time to fact check every single detail in this post.  I am writing with a sense of urgency.  I will post corrections later if I find any substantive mistakes.  But here are a number of thoughts on the bill, in the form of a simple Q&A.

First, why does this problem exist?

The answer is easy: for many decades, Illinois did not pay its bills.  Our pensions have been underfunded every single year for decades.  We hid behind flawed government accounting, pension funding “holidays,” and found temporary cover in the rising equity markets during the technology bubble.

-          This is the fault of our politicians.  The problem is bipartisan – Republican and Democrat Governors have underfunded our pensions, and both Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate have voted to do so.

-          Public workers are not to blame.  They paid their share and were promised constitutionally protected pensions in return for lower salaries.

Why do we need reform?

-          Regardless of whose fault it is, the pension costs are fiscally unsustainable.  We have dug a hole so deep that we have no choice but to partially default on some of our promises.  It is a sad truth.  But it is the truth.

-          We have a pension funding hole that is officially about $100 billion.  But these official statistics drastically understate the problem.  It is only a $100 billion hole if you think we can generate 7.5% to 8% returns on the pension assets every single year without any risk.  No economist believes that.  When valued the way any financial economist would value the liabilities, the funding shortfall is more on the order of $250 billion.

-          Illinois has the lowest bond rating of any state in the country.  This drives up our borrowing costs, and sends a clear signal to companies and entrepreneurs that taxes will be higher in the future.  Few things drive away business more quickly than an unstable fiscal environment.

-          We have enormous structural deficits that show no signs of abating.  Even with the “temporary” tax increase (when the individual rate rose from 3% to 5% of income and the corporate rate increased proportionately), we still are running deficits.  We cannot just keep raising taxes, or we will start an economic death spiral in the state as mobile capital and labor flee the state.

Is it possible to do this in a sensible way?

-          Yes, but it will not be free from pain.  Put simply, there is only one way to solve this – somebody must pay.  The question is how to share that burden equitably.  Taxpayers benefitted for the last several decades by receiving public services at a substantial discount because we borrowed against the pensions to pay for those services.  Retirees benefitted from pensions that were larger than we were paying for.  Unions benefitted from bargaining for greater benefits when it was hard to get salary increases.  Universities and school districts benefitted by not having to directly pay the full cost of their hiring.  Everyone – knowingly or unknowingly – was complicit.  Everyone benefitted.  So everyone should have to share the pain of the solution.

-          No matter how much the Wall Street Journal may wish it to be so, there really is no conceivable way to eliminate the existing unfunded liability right away.  One would have to violate the state constitution by defaulting on 60 percent or more of all benefits that have already been earned by current retirees and current workers.

-          With several other experts, I co-authored a pension reform proposal that outlined Six Simple Steps to reform pensions in a rational way.  It spread the pain, aligned incentives, and solved the state’s problem in the long-run.  Details can be found at the IGPA website.

How would S.B. 1 affect bondholders?

-          Bondholders are clear winners.  Any substantial reduction in pension benefits is great news for bondholders.  After all, they simply care about their debt being repaid, and pensions are competing for scarce dollars.

How would S.B. 1 affect participants in the Self-Managed Plan?   

-          Participants in the Self-Managed Plan are totally unaffected.

How would S.B. 1 affect low income state employees in the Traditional or Portable Plan?

-          If someone close to retirement has earned a pension of $30,000 per year or less, and worked for the state for 30 years, the changes will be small.   Younger workers still many years from retirement will have to work more years before being eligible, and you would not receive the cost of living adjustment in up to 5 of the first 10 years you are retired.

-          All workers would benefit from the 1% reduction in employee contributions.  So given how small the benefit cuts are for low income workers, they may actually come out ahead.

How would medium earning state employees in the Traditional or Portable Plan be affected?

-          By medium earners, I am referring to those with annual salaries from about $45,000 to about $110,000.  In addition to the increase in retirement age, these workers will see a cap on their cost of living adjustment in retirement.  Instead of getting a 3% per year increase on their total pension, they will receive an inflation adjustment only on the first $1000*X dollars, where X is the number of years they worked.  So, for a 30 year worker making above $45,000 per year (which roughly corresponds to a $30,000 pension), you will see smaller future cost-of-living increases.  If you are earning $90,000 per year, and earning a pension of around $60,000 after 30 years of service, you will essentially be getting a cost-of-living increase on only half your pension.

How would high earners in the Traditional or Portable plan be affected?

-          This is where the substantial pain comes in.  The key provision – the one that takes a meat-axe to pensions – is the cap on pensionable salary.  If you earn above approximately $110,000, all future salary increases will be disregarded for purposes of calculating your pension.

-          To see how much this matters:  Suppose you have worked here for 5 years already, and expect a 3% per year salary increase (this is 3% nominal, so if inflation runs 3%, this means you are getting no increase in real terms).  Given the miracle of compounding, this means that your salary will more than double in nominal terms over 25 years.   So if you were to retire after 30 years, you will be getting 66% of your current salary rather than your doubled salary.  This is a 50% cut in pension benefits.

-          This 50% cut is ON TOP OF the reductions from the increase in retirement age and the COLA reduction.  All in all, I have estimated that the total cut could be as much as 65% for some workers.

-          The cut is steeper the more years you have left ahead of you, and the steeper your salary trajectory.

-          Even if you are not subject to the cap now, if your salary grows faster than the cap, you could become subject to the cap later.

-          In present value, this is equivalent to a substantial cut in future total compensation – on the order of 10-15% of salary now and forever.

Is this constitutional?

-          It depends on how the Courts interpret the non-impairment clause.   Under the strictest interpretation, any cut would be a violation.

-          But I continue to think the most reasonable interpretation of the clause is that the state cannot cut benefits already accrued as of the date of reform.  Under this interpretation, the retirement age increase would be a violation, but the other provisions would not be because they apply only to future benefit accruals.

-          It appears that lawmakers want to argue that a 1% reduction in contribution rates will be sufficient “consideration” to offset the benefit cuts, thus making this legal.  That seems absurd to me – a 12% reduction in contributions does not compensate for a 60% cut in benefits.  But I am not a lawyer, so who knows?

What will the long-run impact on U of I be?

-          The university is going to face a tough problem – how to prevent an exodus of top talent without “breaking the bank” already-strained institution.

-          Don’t be surprised if this translates into a long-run reduction in hiring plans as a way to come up with the funds to pay for any attempt to retain existing people.

How will the University of Illinois respond?

-          First, the University is officially opposing the legislation, as it should.

-          Second, University leadership seems well aware that they are going to have to do something to partially offset these changes or we are going to lose our very best people – especially in higher earning units like Medicine, Engineering, Business and Law.  I would anticipate some effort to provide employer contributions to a 403(b), or something similar, to partially offset these changes for those most affected.

What should I do now?

-          Call your lawmakers and ask them to vote no.

-          Then, if it passes, do NOT take any irreversible actions.  Give the Courts time to sort out the constitutionality.  And give the University time to come up with a partial remediation plan.

-          Perhaps talk with a financial planner or advisor about steps you can do to increase retirement savings on your own.

Earlier this year, I co-authored a proposal with four colleagues to reform the Illinois State Universities Retirement System. My motivation for doing so was quite simple: the fiscal crisis facing the state of Illinois is very real, “doing nothing” is not an option, the politicians seemed to be making little headway on a solution, and the ideas that were under consideration appeared to be driven far more by ideology than by concern about good retirement policy and good fiscal policy.  Given that I have spent the past 15 years of my life developing academic, policy and practical expertise on issues related to retirement income security, I thought I owed it to Illinois taxpayers to make a serious attempt to bring some balanced, centrist thinking into the discussion.  My four co-authors brought exceptional expertise in areas of university administration, benefits design, state and local public finance, and other highly relevant topics.  Together, we proposed six specific reforms to the SURS system.

Our “Six Simple Steps” proposal was subsequently endorsed by the Presidents and Chancellors of all of the public universities in Illinois.  It has also received favorable feedback from many participants and retirees. Over the summer, our proposal gained serious political traction when the bicameral, bipartisan pension committee of the Illinois General Assembly began to treat it as a leading possibility for breaking through the political logjam that had stifled prior attempts at reform.

Now that our proposal – which is sometimes referred to by others as the “Universities Plan” or the “IGPA Plan” – has gained traction, the political knives are coming out on both sides of the ideological divide.  This is not surprising: under our proposal, faculty are being asked to contribute more, retirees are being asked to receive less, the universities are being asked to take on greater financial responsibility for future costs, and the state is being put on the hook for paying down the enormous unfunded liability.  There is plenty of pain to go around.

We did not cause the pain, of course.  The pain was caused by many generations Illinois General Assembly members who failed to behave with even a modicum of fiscal responsibility.  We are just asking legislators, participants, retirees and taxpayers to be honest about the severity of the problem and to take meaningful steps to stop the fiscal bleeding.  But, in a highly politicized environment, with billions of dollars at stake, I am not at all surprised that ideologues and interest groups are pulling out their knives and trying to cut down our proposal.

So allow me to let you in on a little secret – I don’t love our proposal either.  A few aspects of it leave a bad taste in my mouth, in the same way that some life-saving medicines do.  However, I honestly consider to be the best – by far – of a wide range of distasteful options.

Let’s be honest: If I lived in a state where the state government was not dysfunctional, where we did not have strictly binding constitutional constraints, and where we could draw up our pension system from a relatively clean slate, I would NOT design a system exactly like the one we are proposing.  Rather, I would commit the state to a credible funding path; I would raise the normal retirement age to be in line with Social Security; I would fully index benefits to inflation and, if needed, pay for it through downward adjustments to initial benefits; and I would align incentives by making the entities responsible for hiring decisions (e.g., the universities) also be responsible for paying the full benefit costs associated with those hiring decisions.  While I am dreaming, I would also require the state to use accounting rules that transparently communicated the real economic cost of pensions, rather than hiding the true costs behind intellectually flawed government accounting standards.  Then again, if I lived in such an ideal world, we probably would not be facing the worst pension funding crisis of any state in the nation, and our proposal would have been unnecessary in the first place.

But we, the residents of Illinois, do not live in such a world.  Rather, we live in a state where for many decades our political leaders have failed to make good on the state’s most basic financial obligations.  As a result, the time has come for us to take our fiscal medicine: everyone must make sacrifices.  Unfortunately, the very constitutional protections that were intended to protect retirees now prevent us from enacting the most sensible reforms (such as raising the retirement age, which nearly every serious analyst agrees is a good idea): instead, we are forced to use second-best policy tools (such as reducing COLAs) simply because they have a better chance of passing constitutional challenge.  And we live in a state where after several unproductive years of debate, various powerful politicians have made it crystal clear that certain types of reform are political “must haves” and others are “cannot haves,” a situation that further narrows the realm of politically feasible options.

With these and other painful realities in mind, my colleagues and I set out to design a plan that made the best of a truly terrible situation.  We settled on a plan that:

1. Has a reasonable chance (although not guaranteed) of being deemed constitutional;
2. Has a reasonable chance of being politically feasible (as demonstrated by the recent support the plan has received from the bicameral bipartisan pension commission);
3. Will substantially improve the state’s long-term fiscal situation;
4. Preserves a smaller defined benefit (DB) element to recognize that many public workers in Illinois are not in Social Security, but also creates a defined contribution (DC) account, in an attempt to balance the various strengths and weaknesses of the two types of plans and create a better system than the Tier II system in place for new employees;
5. Improves the retirement security of new employees through more favorable vesting rules (that are also more closely aligned with private sector practice);
6. Provides real – if imperfect – inflation protection by linking increases to the CPI, rather than providing an arbitrary annual nominal increase that leads to enormous fluctuations in retirees’ real standards of living;
7. Substantially increases the likelihood that the state will begin to pay down the unfunded liability, both by reducing the state’s share of future costs and by providing the stakeholders with a legal right to enforce state funding;
8. Appropriately aligns incentives so that universities bear the full cost of their hiring decisions;
9. Suggests many other features that attempt to bring some rationality and transparency to a complex and opaque system (such as reducing the hidden subsidy provided via a financially inappropriately high Effective Rate of Interest);

In recent weeks, once it became clear our plan was gaining political traction, two different analyses came out criticizing our Six Step Plan.  There are two things to note about these criticisms:

First, neither critique provides a truly serious alternative that is politically, legally and fiscally realistic.

Second, the criticisms are striking in the extent to which they are mirror-images, taking precisely opposing views to one another.  The first of these critiques was offered by the Illinois Policy Institute.  They criticize our plan for preserving the DB system, not moving fully to a DC world, not eliminating COLAs, not saving enough money, and taking too long to phase in the changes.  The second of these critiques is by a researcher at University of Illinois at Chicago and the head of Keystone Research Center.  They criticize our plan for not preserving the DB system in its entirety, for suggesting the introduction of a DC element, for partially reducing COLAs, for asking the state to pay down the unfunded liability too quickly and for cutting benefits too much.  And, in an amazing feat of mental gymnastics, they also suggest that by reducing  spending the plan will somehow raise costs to the state.

To the extent we were trying to design a proposal in the “sensible center” of this debate, I will take these completely offsetting criticisms as confirmation that we are on the right track.

Here is a brief table summarizing how the two critiques often negate each other, in their own words (followed by my parenthetic and italicized remarks summarizing their view in my own words).

I can understand why those who advocate for the smallest possible government would be disappointed with a plan that does not squeeze out even more savings from the pockets of public sector workers.  I can also understand why some public sector workers and retirees would oppose any benefit reduction.  But such extreme views, while potentially useful for advocacy purposes, do not make for good public policy.  The above comparison make it self-evident that these two critiques are attempts to bolster opposing untenable positions: the Illinois Policy Institute would prefer that we decimate retirement security, and the KeyStone group naively acts as if we can solve this crisis without meaningful changes to benefits.  Supporters of both positions will be disappointed with any realistic proposal that actually solves Illinois’ pension problem while preserving retirement security of public workers.

You may not like our plan.  As I noted earlier, I am not in love with it either.  But I still think it is the best idea out there so far.  Very little in the Illinois Policy Institute or Keystone critiques alters my view with the exception of continuing the existing Self-Managed Plan as a voluntary option for some new employees, as suggested by the Illinois Policy Institute, although I do not think it is the best choice for the median employee.

I am totally open to the possibility that better ideas than ours may still be out there – and if either of these two groups (or any other group or individual) have substantive suggestions that are fiscally responsible AND politically feasible AND constitutional AND not unduly harmful to public employees, I would love to hear them.  So far, however, I continue to believe our Six Step proposal is the most serious proposal on the table.

 Prof. Jeffrey R. Brown, 8/19/2013

 (Author’s note: the opinions expressed here are those of the author – Prof. Jeffrey Brown – alone, and do not necessarily represent the views of any of my co-authors or the University of Illinois.)

Like millions of Americans, I was deeply shaken by the horrible tragedy that unfolded at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown Connecticut one week ago today.  As a father, as an American – simply, as a human being – I was horrified by the thought that anyone could be capable of gunning down innocent and helpless children.  My rage toward the killer was outweighed only by the terrible sadness for the children and deep sympathy for their families.

As the hours and days have gone by, however, my raw emotional response has slowly – if not fully successfully – made some room for my inner economist to begin to examine the situation from an analytical perspective.

Today, Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA, stated that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” This is a provocative statement, so I thought it was time to examine this issue more closely.

So let me ask a simple question: “Would America’s children be safer if we had more guns, or fewer guns?”

I would like to assume that, with the exception of a few sociopaths, everyone wants our children to be safer.  I do not subscribe to the extremist rhetoric from either side that assumes they are the only ones with the moral high ground and that the “other side” is somehow anti-kids.  Rather, I think both sides agree on the goal – to keep our kids safe – but have a very different view of how to get there.

But who is right?  Would our children be safer with more guns or fewer guns?

To provide some insight, I would like to adapt a simple model that is used to discuss tax policy (stay with me here!) – the “Laffer curve.” (Click here for information on the Laffer curve). 

If there were zero guns available in the U.S., then by definition there would be zero gun-related deaths.  Starting from zero, as the number of guns increases, the frequency of gun related deaths would surely rise, at least initially.  But it probably would not rise forever as shown in this graph.

Why?  Consider the other extreme – the vision of the NRA – where virtually every citizen was armed.  Teachers, professors, airline pilots, nurses, truck drivers, accountants … everyone.

According to the NRA, in such a world, criminals would be reluctant to commit a crime because they know that they would be putting themselves in grave danger.  Or even if they did, an armed good guy would stop them.

What this means is that if gun violence is low at low levels of gun ownership, and also low at high levels of gun ownership, then there must be a horrible “peak” in between where the number of gun-related deaths is at its highest (the peak).

We have over a quarter of a billion guns in the U.S. The question is whether this is above or below the peak.  If it is below the peak, then more guns cause more gun-related deaths, and deaths would decline if we had more effective gun control laws.  In contrast, if we are above the Peak, then small decreases in the number of guns can actually cause more deaths.  Relatedly, if we are above the Peak, then increasing the number of guns can reduce the number of gun-related deaths.  This is what the NRA seems to believe.

This is a simplistic model.  But it does provide an important insight: theoretically, gun control could make us safer or it could make us less safe.  Gun control advocates are implicitly assuming we are to the left of the peak.  Gun rights advocates are implicitly assuming we are to the right of the peak.

So, what does the evidence say?

The good news is that it is possible to test this.  The bad news is that it is very hard to do it well.  One cannot simply assert that “in country X, they have tighter gun control laws and also fewer gun deaths, so therefore fewer guns causes fewer deaths.”  To do so would be to ignore countless other factors – cultural, religious, legal, economic, demographic – that might cause country X to have fewer deaths and also cause them to pass more stringent gun control laws.

Fortunately, some economists have written good papers on gun control.  (Sadly, other economists have written bad papers on gun control, meaning that they are sloppy, confuse correlation with causation, and therefore should not be used to guide policy debates.)

University of Chicago economist John Lott is the most well-known researcher on the issue.  His findings are easily summarized by the name of his book “More guns, less crime.”  In other words, Lott believes we are way past the peak and that people would likely be safer if we had fewer restrictions on guns.  As is often the case when someone writes something so provocative, Lott’s research has come under attack.  A summary of the controversies and criticisms can be found here.

Aside from just attacking Lott’s work, others have tried to examine this issue on their own.  In my opinion, the single best study on this topic was conducted by Prof. Mark Duggan, a Harvard-trained Ph.D. in economics who is now a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.  His paper, “More Guns, More Crime” was published in one of the most elite peer-reviewed economics journals in the world.  He finds that “changes in homicide and gun ownership are significantly positively related” (thus, his title – more guns lead to more crime.)  Importantly, he also finds that “this relationship is almost entirely driven by the relationship between lagged changes in gun ownership and current changes in homicide.”  This is really important because it is evidence that this correlation comes about because guns lead to more homicides, rather than an increase in homicides leading more people to buy guns.

The Duggan study also specifically examines the Lott study.  He agrees that, theoretically, concealed carry laws could increase the likelihood that potential victims could carry a gun, and thus reduce the homicide rate (my simple model above).  However, he concludes that he finds “no evidence that counties with above-average rates of gun ownership within CCW states experienced larger declines in crime than low-ownership counties did, suggesting either that gun owners did not increase the frequency with which they carried their guns or that criminals were not being deterred.”  In other words, there is no evidence to support the NRA’s view.

I came into this debate over the past week with an open mind.  My reading of the evidence, however, suggests that more guns cause more crime, and that concealed carry laws would not reduce crime.

Our nation may still decide not to restrict guns because of the Second Amendment.  But if so, let’s at least do it with our eyes open.  We should not be pretending that we are helping kids by promoting gun ownership.

Retirement plans such as the 401(k) receive favorable tax treatment under the U.S. income tax system.  Historically, this favorable tax treatment was provided to increase individual saving.  Recent research has called the efficacy of this approach into question, suggesting that individual saving rates may not be all that responsive to marginal tax rates.

Last week, I wrote about the danger of drawing the conclusion that tax incentives do not matter and that we should therefore look to eliminate the tax preference for retirement saving.  My focus was on the role that tax preferences play in providing an incentive for employers to offer plans, and to design them in a way that uses behavioral nudges to increase saving.

This week, I want to focus on a different aspect of this issue, the public discussion of which has been misleading – how much this tax preference costs the U.S. Treasury.  My contention is that the cost figures being bandied about (including my own use of the $100 billion figure in last week’s post) are substantially overstated.  The point of today’s post is to note that the amount of revenue that the government would receive by eliminating the preferential tax treatment for retirement saving would be much less than what it might appear.

To understand this, one must understand (1) how retirement plans are treated under U.S. tax law, (2) how the government actually accounts for the foregone revenue, and (3) how the government ought to account for the foregone revenue.  These are complex topics, but some simple exposition is sufficient for seeing the main point.

(1)   How are retirement plans treated under U.S. tax law?  In a nutshell, the income tax on retirement plan contributions is deferred, not eliminated.  This is an important distinction.  If I receive an additional $1000 in cash salary, and I am in a 35% tax bracket, I owe the government an additional $350 in taxes.  If, however, I receive this additional $1,000 in the form of a contribution to a 401(k) plan, I owe no taxes today.  However, I will owe taxes on the money when I withdraw it during retirement.  Of course, there is financial value to deferring my taxes (what we economists call tax free “inside build-up”), but it is not as if the initial contribution escapes the tax system entirely.

(2)   How does the government account for the foregone revenue?  The U.S. Department of Treasury and the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation prepare annual estimates of what they label “tax expenditures.”  These tax expenditures are basically just an estimate of how much additional tax would be collected if a particular activity went from being untaxed to being taxed, assuming no behavioral response to the tax.  (As an aside, the fact that they do not account for a behavioral response is why they are careful to always note that “a tax expenditure estimate is not the same as a revenue estimate.”)  In the case of retirement plan contributions, they roughly calculate the amount of money being deferred, apply the relevant marginal tax rates to it, and obtain a rough estimate of how much revenue is not being collected as a result of this tax preference.  However, a key point is that they do not estimate this over the entire life of the account, but rather use an arbitrarily truncated time horizon to estimate the effects.

Going back to my simple example: suppose I contribute an additional $1,000 today to a 401(k) plan.  That saves me $350 in taxes today, and costs the government $350 in foregone revenue in the current tax year (assuming I would save the same amount either way).  So far, so good.  But suppose that I plan to pull the money out in 20 years.  I will pay income taxes on the amount I withdraw.  The present discounted value of the tax that I pay in 20 years will likely be less than $350, but it will be much greater than zero.  For the sake of example, suppose it is worth $150 in present value.  If so, then the net gain to me (and the net cost to government) over my lifetime is $200.  The problem is that the government does not use a present value method.  Instead, it looks at just the front end, and thus overstates the value of the deduction.

(3)   How should the government account for tax expenditures?  Ideally, the government would compute these tax expenditures using the “present value” concept just explained.  A number of experts have made this suggestion.  For example, a paper by the American Society of Pension Professionals and Actuaries (ASPPA) boldly states “tax expenditure estimates for retirement savings provisions should be prepared on a present-value basis” because this “would allow an ‘apples to apples’ comparison” with other tax deductions.

What does all this imply?  A paper written by two Treasury Department officials and published in the December 2011 National Tax Journal found that “the long-run NPV cost can be dramatically different if measured using relatively short time horizons.”  The calculations are a bit tricky because one must make assumptions about rates of return, the appropriate discount rate, current and future marginal tax rates, and so on.  And the extent to which estimates differ depends on the time horizon being examined.

But, these caveats aside, the ASPPA study concludes that “the present-value tax expenditure estimates of contributions made in the first five years are 55 percent lower than the JCT five-year estimates and 75 percent lower than the Treasury five-year estimates.”  That is a huge wedge.

How does all this matter for policy?  The fiscal cliff has DC policymakers scouring the four corners of the earth looking for ways to boost revenue without raising marginal tax rates.  One way to do this is to eliminate tax expenditures.  However, some of those tax expenditures exist for good economic reasons, and the provision of favorable tax treatment for retirement saving is one of them.

As noted last week, the elimination of this provision could have serious unintended consequences for the availability of retirement savings programs through employers.  Now add to that the fact that any revenue implications of such a policy change are substantially overstated and what you get is the potential for good intentions (closing the fiscal gap) to lead to bad policy.

Relevant Disclosures:  I serve as a trustee for TIAA, a provider of retirement plans to the not-for-profit sector.  I have also received compensation as a consultant or speaker for a wide range of other financial services institutions.  The opinions expressed in this blog (and any errors) are my own.

Earlier this week, I released a report co-authored with Avijit Ghosh and Scott Weisbenner (both of the University of Illinois) and Steve Cunningham (Northern Illinois) that – yet again – tries to make the case for pension reform.  The news release can be found here and the full paper (including a one page summary) can be found here.

In a nutshell, the plan has three components:

1.  Change some of the SURS rules to reduce costs and increase transparency.  This includes pegging the SURS’ effective rate of interest to long-term bond rates.  For my prior musings on this topic, click here to see the blog I wrote on this back in June of 2010, entitled “A Hidden Pension Subsidy in SURS.”

2.  Providing participants with an opportunity to opt out of their automatic annual adjustment (sometimes called the COLA) in exchange for a lump-sum that is calculated to give participants a bit of a “haircut.”  We consider this to be a reasonably fair exchange, especially given its voluntary nature, in sharp contrast to the forced choice that has been proposed in other legislation (for example, see Nolan Miller’s post entitled “The Choice Between Two Unconstitutional Options is Not Constitutional.”)

3.  Expand the Illinois state income tax base to include retirement income.  There is really no compelling economic reason to exempt retirement income from the Illinois state income tax, and this may be the only way to get the retired generation to be able to contribute to solving our fiscal problems.

Whether or not our proposal has an influence on the debates in Springfield is anybody’s guess.  But one thing is clear: absent some time of substantial reform, Illinois is teetering close to a true fiscal cliff, one that will make the Washington DC fiscal cliff look like a small step down.

Earlier this week, the New York Times Economix Blog wrote a piece “Study Questions Tax Breaks’ Effect on Retirement Savings.”  The article summarizes the findings of a fantastic research paper issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).  A quick summary of the paper written by the authors themselves can be found here.  The short version is that the researchers used data from Denmark (where much better date is available) to provide evidence that tax subsidies have little effect on overall savings rates.

Their main finding is that “when individuals in the top income tax bracket received a larger tax subsidy for retirement savings, they started saving more in retirement accounts.  But the same individuals reduced the amount they were saving outside retirement accounts by almost exactly the same amount, leaving total savings essentially unchanged. We estimate each that $1 of government expenditure on the subsidy raised total savings by 1 cent.”

The policy implications of their finding are extremely important given the current debate about fiscal policy in the U.S.  After all, if tax subsidies for saving do not actually increase saving, then perhaps we should re-think the $100 billion per year that we forego in tax revenue by exempting retirement savings from the income tax base?  Such a conclusion would be quite tempting to politicians who are desperately seeking ways of raising revenue without raising tax rates.

But I say “not so fast.”  Although I do not disagree with the empirical findings of the study, I strongly disagree with the assertions being made by some that this finding justifies the elimination of the tax preference for 401(k) and other retirement vehicles.

The study itself is an outstanding intellectual contribution, and one that will likely (and deservedly) end up being published in a leading scholarly journal.  I can personally vouch for the high intelligence and research integrity of the two U.S. authors.  Raj Chetty was named a MacArthur “Genius” earlier this year, and is widely expected to be awarded the prestigious John Bates Clark medal sometime in the next 6-8 years.  John Friedman of Harvard is also an emerging research star in the economics profession.

So, the researchers are top notch, the study is extremely well done, and the conclusion is that tax subsidies do not generate net much net savings.  So, why not simply eliminate the tax preference for 401(k) plans in the U.S. and raise a trillion dollars of revenue over the next decade?

Because of the important role of plan sponsors, that is why.

For better or for worse, the employer plays a central role in the U.S. retirement system.  Although there are several reasons that employers offer retirement plans and other employee benefits (e.g., to differentially attract certain types of workers, to help manage retirement dates, to motivate workers, etc.), there is little question that the large tax subsidy  looms very large in their decision to use retirement plans – as opposed to other types of benefits – to achieve these outcomes.

To qualify for favorable tax treatment, employer provided retirement plans, including the 401(k), must meet a long list of “plan qualification requirements.”  These requirements are what provide Congress and regulators the ability to influence the design of retirement plans.

An important example is the set of “non-discrimination rules” designed to ensure broad-based participation in an employer’s plan.  These rules provide incentives for plan sponsors to find innovative ways of encouraging saving by their employees.  Indeed, it is not much of a stretch to suggest that these rules are the reason we have seen the widespread adoption over the years of employer matching contributions, automatic enrollment, automatic escalation of contributions, and numerous other innovations in the retirement plan space that have been shown to increase saving.

The authors themselves note that “automatic enrollment or default policies that nudge individuals to save more could have larger impacts on national saving at lower fiscal cost.”  I agree that behavioral nudges have had an enormous impact.  But in an employer based retirement plan system, the only way to get employers to offer those nudges is to provide them with a compelling financial reason to do so.  In essence, tax subsidies are the nudge for employers to provide the nudge for employees.

Of course, this does not necessarily mean that the existing system should be treated as sacrosanct.  It may be that employers would continue to offer 401(k)’s – along with their numerous savings nudges – if the financial incentive were provided in a less expensive way (e.g., by capping deductibility).  That is a debate we ought to have (hopefully informed by evidence of the same high quality as the NBER study).  My point is simply that any policy discussion should recognize the very important role that employers play as trusted sponsors of the plan, and be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Indeed, given that only about half of US workers have opportunities to save through their current employer, we should be looking for ways to encourage more employers to sponsor plans.  If we go after the tax incentives for retirement saving, we must be careful not to inadvertently destroy the plan sponsor infrastructure that is the foundation of retirement security for millions of Americans.

Relevant Disclosures:  I am a Research Associate of the NBER (through which the study above was released) and Associate Director of the NBER Retirement Research Center (through which the authors have received some funding for their study).  I am also a trustee for TIAA CREF, a provider of retirement plans to the not-for-profit sector.  I have also received compensation as a consultant or speaker for a wide range of other financial services institutions.  The opinions expressed in this blog (and any errors) are my own.

I find myself bemused by the sheer number of commentators that have labeled vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan a “radical” because of his views on the federal budget.  His core view – that we ought to keep federal spending as a share of GDP at a level approximately equal to where it has been for the entire lifetimes of most Americans – strikes me as far less radical than the current policy status quo.

Let’s start with some basic facts.  In the post-war period in the U.S., federal spending has averaged just under 20 percent of GDP.  (You can confirm this for yourself by going to the White House OMB site and downloading Table 1.2).  There have clearly been some ups and downs over this period for a variety of reasons, but it has never exceeded a quarter of GDP except for 2009 – the depths of the Great Recession – when outlays reached 25.2% of GDP.

In other words, for 60 years – through military conflicts great and small, through booms and busts, through the creation and demise of countless government programs, and through tectonic shifts in the global economic landscape, the U.S. has found it possible to keep government at about 20% of GDP.  And throughout this period, the economic engine of the U.S. remained the envy of the world, even now in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Absent substantial changes to our public policies, however, U.S. government spending as a share of GDP is projected to rise at an unprecedented rate.  According to the CBO’s “extended alternative fiscal scenario,” which they describe roughly as a continuation of current policies, spending as a share of GDP is projected rise to 35.7% of GDP in just the next 25 years.  This seems to me to be prima facie evidence that our future fiscal problems are being driven by rising spending, rather than a lack of revenue.

Given this, what sounds more radical?  Suggesting that we make cut the growth rate of spending to keep the ratio of government-to-GDP near historical levels, as Paul Ryan has suggested?  Or allowing government to grow from 20% to over 35% of GDP?

Google’s definition of radical is “affecting the fundamental nature of something.”  A failure to change policy course would affect the fundamental nature of the U.S. economy.  Now that is radical.

If we want to avoid this, then we need to re-think the role of government.  Most of the future projected growth of government is due to a rising health care costs and an aging population.  One cannot slow rising health care costs and population aging simply by cutting spending, as any serious student of the budget – of which I consider Paul Ryan to be one – already knows.  Nor is it obvious we really want to stop all those trends – at least some of the rise in health spending brings new health benefits, and most of us are quite happy to live longer.

What we can do is recognize that our programs need to change with the times.  Remaining life expectancy today, conditional on reaching age 62, is about 50% longer than it was in the 1960s.  Yet we continue to encourage people to exit the labor force early.  Even worse, we have created a mentality where most Americans seem to believe that they have a God-given right to have their retirement income and health care expenses paid for by taxpayers after they reach age 62 or 65.  At a minimum, we should recognize that if people are living both longer and healthier lives than they were in decades past, we ought to make them wait longer to start receiving benefits.

There are good reasons to have Social Security and Medicare.  But we need to recognize that the fiscal burden they are placing on taxpayers is going to grow rapidly in the years to come, and that the best way forward is to reform them to make them sustainable for future generations.  Paying for these rapid cost increases through an inefficient tax system that depresses investment, discourages entrepreneurship, penalizes work, and retards economic growth is the real “radical” solution – and the one that should work hard to avoid.

Today’s Wall Street Journal carried a piece called “Should Tenure for College Professors Be Abolished?”  It pitted two individuals with strongly held views against each other on the issue.  As so often happens when people are advocating rather than analyzing, both sides selectively examined the issue.

In favor of abolishing tenure, the WSJ featured Naomi Schaefer Riley, a critic of the tenure system who appears to believe that teaching is the only worthwhile activity in which academics engage.  It was a bit ironic for me to read this on a day in which I am sitting at an academic conference on consumer financial decision-making in Boulder, exchanging ideas with some of the nation’s top scholars from a diverse set of fields (including law, economics, marketing, psychology, law and public policy) regarding new research that is both widely read and enormously impactful in the real world.  As but one example, the conference was kicked off yesterday by Shlomo Benartzi at UCLA, who reminded audience members how academic research led to a revolution in retirement policy in the U.S., improving the retirement security of millions of Americans by increasing participation and contribution rates to 401(k) plans by leveraging the insights of psychology and behavioral economics.  Apparently, Ms. Riley does not believe that such activities add much value and that we academics should just stay on campus and teach.

Defending the tenure system was Dr. Cary Nelson, an English professor at my own academic institution (the University of Illinois) and President of the American Association of University Professors.  Dr. Nelson seems to believe that tenure is “the ultimate quality check” and that academic freedom would crumble if people were not granted lifetime tenure.  I am unaware of any compelling evidence supporting such claims, although I cannot refute them either.

As an economist, I think that both authors – neither of whom I found particularly persuasive – missed an obvious way to frame this issue.  Namely, tenure is a form of insurance.  And like any insurance, it has both positive and negative effects.  Here are a few:

1. Tenure reduces the cost of hiring faculty.  Tenure – insurance against job loss – is highly valuable, and therefore substitutes for other forms of compensation. In a competitive labor market (and, contrary to what many non-academics believe, the market for faculty is extremely competitive), tenure means that institutions do not have to pay faculty as much in the form of cash or benefits.  If we abolish tenure, the new market equilibrium would result in higher average salaries, thus further increasing the cost of education.
2. Tenure creates moral hazard:  Moral hazard is the well-established phenomenon that people behave differently when they have insurance than when they do not.  Because tenure provides insurance against the loss of a job  – in spite of Dr. Nelson’s protests to the contrary – tenure can have the effect of making some faculty members reduce effort.

To be clear, I honestly do not believe this reduction in effort is the case with the vast majority of the tenured faculty members that I know – in fact, most of us lament the fact that, post-tenure, our work hours and the demands on our time increase.  Indeed, I think the selection effect is huge – gaining tenure is so difficult at the top institutions that the only people who make it are, by their nature, extremely driven individuals.  Most of these people do not shut-down after tenure – it is simply not in their DNA.  So, one way to view the tenure process is that it creates enormously strong incentives to excel for during the probationary, pre-tenure period (that typically lasts anywhere from 6-10 years).  This is not all that different from many partnerships – law firms, accounting firms, etc. – that work their junior associates to the bone in exchange for eventually becoming a partner.  I am not suggesting that partners have indefinite tenure, only that the incentive effects early in one’s career make untenured assistant professors some of the hardest working people I have ever met.

However, although it is the exception rather than the norm, all of us in the academy know members of the faculty – thankfully, far fewer in numbers than most non-academics imagine – that take advantage of their protected status by slacking.  Their research productivity declines, they spend less time preparing for classes, and they are less engaged in their departments and professions.  This “dead wood” – while not exceedingly common – is exceedingly costly when it occurs.  Most of us in universities would love to rid ourselves of this problem.

I may be in a minority of faculty, but I would personally not mind having a conversation about abolishing tenure and replacing it with a system of, say, 5-year renewable contracts, but not for the naïve and misguided reasons that Ms. Riley states.  Rather, I believe that for the highly productive among us, our salaries would increase and we would have an effective tool for eliminating the deadwood in our ranks.

Granted, the “tenure as insurance” framework is far from the only set of factors that ought to be considered.  Some of the issues raised by Ms. Riley and Dr. Nelson – how tenure affects risk-taking, teaching quality, and so forth – are incredibly important considerations.  It would just be nice to have some solid empirical evidence on the size and direction of these effects before taking a final stand on the issue.  Until I see it, I am going to head back downstairs to the behavioral decision-making context to see some of the research that I honestly believe is going to help improve lives.

After a week of legislative wrangling that had more twists and turns than Hawaii’s famous “Road to Hana,” the Illinois General Assembly failed to come to agreement last week on a pension reform package in time for yesterday’s May 31 deadline.  As a result, they will return to Springfield – possibly this week – for a special session facing an even larger hurdle for passing reform legislation: by Illinois law, bills passed after May 31 require a three-fifths vote rather than a simple majority.

Agreement fell apart over the issue of who should pay for the “normal cost” of future public pension accruals.  “Downstate” lawmakers objected to shifting all of the costs onto school districts, public universities and community colleges on the grounds that this would lead to higher property taxes to fund teacher pensions and do grave damage to the ability of our university system to compete for academic talent.  Once Democratic Governor Quinn agreed to pull this cost-shifting out of the bill, Democratic House Speaker Mike Madigan withdrew his support of the bill.

As I wrote this past Wednesday, one of the grave concerns I have about the leading proposals is that so many of our elected officials seem perfectly content to shift all of the costs onto universities and school districts while maintaining legislative control over the design of the benefits package.  This is a mistake on so many levels.  The separation of responsibility and control is a recipe for fiscal shenanigans.  It is also highly disrespectful of the employer-employee relationship that Bob Rich and I wrote about in our pension reform proposal earlier this year.  

Although I still like the plan that Bob Rich and I put out, it seems clear that the General Assembly has gone another route.  But given that they are stuck on the cost-shifting issue, I thought it might be useful to put forth a more radical proposal that would respect the constitutional constraints, appropriately align the incentives of all the affected parties, respect the employer/employee relationship, and still save the state billions.  Perhaps most importantly from a political perspective, it might overcome the cost-shifting stalemate, because it shifts the costs but offers something very valuable in return.  This proposal would apply to those institutions – such as school districts, universities and community colleges – that, while public, are not part of the state government apparatus itself.  

While “radical,” the idea is deceptively simple.  Here it is in 4 simple steps:

1.       The state agrees to pay 100% of all pension benefits that have been accrued by public sector retirees and current workers as of 7/1/2013.  Whether the state wishes to do this by paying down the amortized unfunded liability, or simply provide the cash as need to pay benefits, is immaterial, so long as they respect the constitutional guarantee and pay it.  Not only does this respect the constitution, but it would also be fair to the generations of workers and retirees who consistently paid their share to the pension fund while the politicians enjoyed their “pension funding holidays.”    

2.       The existing public pension plans – for example, TRS and SURS – are closed to all further accruals as of 7/1/2013.  No new benefits will be earned under any of the plans.

3.       Going forward, each state employer is given 100% autonomy – free from the shackles of state regulation and political interference – to construct a benefits package that is optimally designed for its own employees.  In order to comply with federal law that applies when a state like Illinois opts out of Social Security, each employer would be required to provide a retirement package that is at least as generous as Social Security.  Beyond that, it would be up to each employer to determine the optimal mix of wages, pensions, and other employee benefits that would be required to attract, retain, motivate, and manage the retirement of their workers.  If similar employers wished to joint together as a group (e.g., all community colleges) to provide a common pension plan, or if unions wanted to provide multi-employer pensions funded by a group of employers, they would be permitted to do this.  But if the University of Illinois decided that its needs differed sufficiently from other public universities, they would have the freedom to go their own way.  

4.       The state would agree to a pre-determined, annual “block grant” (basically, an extra appropriation) to each employer that would start out as an amount equal to the “normal cost” of providing pensions, and would gradually decline to zero over a 20-year period of time.  This would slowly shift the entire financial burden of providing pensions from the state to the employers themselves.  

In essence, this plan calls for 100% cost-shifting, but with two critical differences relative to the reform package being debated last week.  First, and most importantly, it accompanies the cost-shifting with a freedom from political interference.  Second, it spreads the cost-shifting out over a much longer period of time (twenty years instead of approximately eight or so) in order to ensure that employers can adapt.

If there is anything I have learned from observing our Illinois state government in action, it is that it cannot relied upon to design a sensible pension package that is fiscally sustainable, credible to employees, and meets the diverse needs of our public employers.  So if they are so eager to get out paying for pensions, let’s take this idea all the way – aside from atoning for their past sins by making good on constitutionally guaranteed promises that they have so far failed to fund – let’s have the state get out of the pension business altogether.  

Doing so would free employers and employees from being subject to the unpredictable whims of the states’ politicians.  And that freedom, it seems to me, is priceless. 

After last night’s somewhat surprising announcement that Speaker Madigan has agreed to the Governor’s request to remove from the pension reform legislation the provision that would have shifted normal costs onto school districts, universities and community colleges, it now appears that particular provision is dead.  Along with it, it appears that the ability of employers to replace the inadequate Tier II pension (for those hired after 1/1/11) wit a new cash balance plan is also dead.

The main provision of forcing a possibly unconstitutional choice between giving up one’s cost-of-living adjustments after retirement or giving up retiree health insurance, however, is still intact.  As is the provision that would freeze pensionable earnings for those that want to keep their current COLA.  And, rumor has it, the legislature is looking for other ways to save costs as well … so look for some additional benefit changes in the final package.

Also, people who don’t work with compound versus simple growth rates on a daily basis may not realize just how big the COLA changes are.  So here is a simple but useful example.  Suppose someone retires at age 60 and lives until age 85.  Under the current law, they receive 3% COLA each year compounded.  Under the proposed law, they get a 0% COLA for the first 5 years, followed by half of inflation or 3%, whichever is less.  If inflation runs at 3% per year, this is a 1.5% non-compounded (i.e., simple) interest.

This may not sound like much.  But don’t be misled — at age 85, this person’s pension would be 37% LOWER UNDER THE PROPOSED LEGISLATION.  If we compute a present value using a 4-6% nominal discount rate, it is a 20% reduction in lifetime pension payments.  This is why the proposal saves so much money.  It is also why it is pretty clearly an impairment or diminishment of benefits!