AEI-Brookings Joint Center Policy Matters 04-26


Retiring Minds Want to Know. Austan Goolsbee. October 2004.

Even as I.B.M.'s pension difficulties make headlines - the company has agreed to pay current and former employees $320 million to settle some charges that changes to its plan discriminated against older workers - a more serious financial disaster looms for the pension system. Taxpayers could face an even larger bill from corporations' failure to put enough money into their pension funds.

Yet neither candidate for president even mentions the problem, and Congress has actually made it worse. The crisis concerns the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal agency that insures workers' pensions in case their employer defaults. The agency charges employers a premium for the insurance, and that money is supposed to cover its costs. The system is not supposed to cost taxpayers anything. But a dreadful lack of judgment, coupled with a new federal law, could leave the public with a $100 billion bill.

In the past two years, the agency has watched its net financial position deteriorate by $20 billion. Overall, corporate pension plans have some $450 billion less than they need to meet their commitments. While corporations are legally required to make these payments unless they declare bankruptcy and can prove they are under "severe financial distress," as much as $100 billion of this bill is owed by companies that are in financial trouble. Just this month, for example, United and US Airways, both of which are already in bankruptcy, announced plans to renege on their pension requirements.

Why doesn't the agency have the money to cover this shortfall? Fundamentally, it is an insurance company. Higher risk ought to mean higher prices; a regular sky diver, for example, pays higher life insurance premiums. But the pension agency doesn't work that way.

The agency's fees are unrelated to investment risk. It charges a fixed amount per corporation and an additional fee based on the amount its pension fund is underfinanced. United had about two-thirds of its pension fund in risky investments, including junk bonds and a Ghanaian gold-mining company. Yet if United had invested every dollar in United States Treasury bonds, it would have paid exactly the same premium to the pension agency.

Thus corporations have little incentive to invest workers' retirement savings wisely. If a bet wins big, a corporation can add that money to the pension plan and keep the funds it would otherwise have been required to contribute. If it loses big, the government will bail it out.

Congress is doing its best to make financial catastrophe more likely. In April, it passed a law that changed accounting rules to make it easier for companies to underfinance pensions. It also gave some companies in the two industries with the worst pension problems - airlines and steel - a two-year waiver from the usual requirement that they close their pension gaps with their own money and allowed them to defer some payments.

Unsurprisingly, they are taking advantage of the opportunity. Continental Airlines, for example, recently announced it would not make a contribution this year to its employees' pension plan. If these corporations declare bankruptcy and default on their pensions, the government bailout will need to be that much larger. According to the pension agency, this law could reduce company contributions by more than $80 billion.

Congress should not be making it easier for corporations to shirk their pension obligations - and neither President Bush nor Senator John Kerry should remain silent when they do. (While Mr. Bush signed the bill into law, neither Mr. Kerry nor his running mate, John Edwards, were present the day the bill passed in the Senate.) If Washington were truly concerned about workers, it would ensure that the pension agency remains solvent. One step in the right direction would be to have the agency charge higher premiums for corporations that make risky investments.

In the meantime, workers with old-style pensions should know that they are at risk of losing a great deal - a prospect that has become all too real for many employees in the airline industry, who frequently gave up wage increases in part for the promise of more generous pensions. Those pensions will be greatly reduced if the pension agency takes over.

It may be too late for many such employees to rescue their pensions. But it's not too late for Congress to act to ensure that employers, not taxpayers, pay more to protect the retirement of working Americans. 

Austan Goolsbee is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

This article appeared in the New York Times on October 1, 2004.