mybudget360.com / by mybudget360 / December 26, 2015
The American pension offered once by many companies was a benefit once afforded to most workers. That is, until the press started chanting the Wall Street party line and all of a sudden 401ks and mutual funds were all the rage. Who wants a tiny pension when you can become a millionaire by simply saving a few dollars per month? Well this experiment started in the early 1980s and here we are, one full generation into the plan and most Americans are entering retirement on the verge of being broke. And this is with the stock market recovering from the lows of 2009. Yet somehow, many Americans never had enough left over to invest after the bills were paid. It is interesting how the pension has been painted as some evil sin while corporate CEOs have ridiculous pay packages that would make Marie Antoinette blush. That is the environment we currently live in. Worship the financial gods while everyone that is poor or struggling is somehow a pariah. Corporate welfare for the connected and painful austerity for the working class. The pension has undergone a slow and painful death at a time when millions of baby boomers are retiring.
The slow death of the American pension
Pensions were very common even in 1980:
“(Third Way) The critical point is who bears these risks. Workers shoulder all the risks in a DC plan while these risks are shared in DB plans between workers and employers. This is a key point because since the 1970s DC plans have become the dominant retirement plan type. In 1980, more than 148,000 DB plans covered 30 million active workers (38% of the workforce), but by 2008 just over 48,000 DB plans covered 18.9 million American active workers (13% of the workforce). Over the same period, the number of DC plans increased from 340,850 to 669,156 with an increase in active workers covered from 14 million (14% of the workforce) in 1980 to more than 67 million (46% of the workforce) in 2008.15 Figure 2 below shows the percentage of the American workforce covered by DB and DC plans since 1975.”
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