Retirement | Econofact

The Burden of Public Pension Promises on State and Local Budgets

By Daniel Bergstresser and Joshua D. Rauh·December 19, 2018
Brandeis University and Stanford University

The Issue:

Unfunded pension liabilities represent a significant challenge to the finances of many state and local governments. While no analysts dispute the general statement that pensions are underfunded in aggregate, there has been some discussion about how to estimate the magnitude of the gap. Moreover, however ...
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Will Social Security be There for You?

By Karen Dynan·June 12, 2018
Harvard University

The Issue:

The good news in the 2018 report of the Trustees of the Social Security Trust Fund, released in early June, was that the program is expected to have enough money to pay for scheduled retirement benefits for the next decade and a half. There are concerns, however, about the longer-run financing of the ...
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Teacher Pension Paradox: Rising Costs and Stagnant or Declining Benefits

By Cory Koedel and Michael Podgursky·May 17, 2018
University of Missouri

The Issue:

Teachers’ strikes across the United States reflect increasing frustration with stagnant compensation and a perceived lack of sufficient funding for education. An important component of the stagnant compensation of teachers is the rising costs of funding pensions. Accumulated debt, in the form of promised ...
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Many American Households Are Still Struggling to Build Wealth

By Karen Dynan·October 7, 2017
Harvard University

The Issue:

Although trends in income bear heavily on economic security at the household level, they are not the whole story. One also needs to look at patterns of wealth holding to fully assess the economic risks facing households. The latest data on wealth show broad-based positive gains for American households ...
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A Public Pension Time-Bomb?

By Daniel Bergstresser·August 2, 2017
Brandeis University

The Issue:

Underfunded pension liabilities have been an important element of most of the recent high-profile public sector defaults, and represent an important challenge for state and local finances. In Puerto Rico unfunded public pension liabilities are about $50 billion of the $123 billion public debt that will ...
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Social Security Benefits: When Do You Plan to Retire?

By Jesse Rothstein·February 9, 2017
University of California, Berkeley

The Issue:

Social Security provides retirement benefits to over 40 million people each year. Current projections indicate that the program faces a long-term financing shortfall, and many Americans wonder whether the program will survive to pay them the benefits they have earned. President Trump pledged repeatedly ...
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