Retirement Systems: Feds vs. States

At the risk of a little personal horn-tooting, I'll note that I was a guest this morning on the Diane Rehm Show on National Public Radio, discussing government retirement benefts.

Much of the focus of the show was on the recent uproar about the solvency of state and local pension plans. I was on with three other people who had a lot more expertise than me about that issue: Leigh Snell, Federal Relations Director of the National Council on Teacher Retirement; David John, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation; and Norman Stein, a law professor at Drexel University.

My job was to explain why the federal system is at considerably less risk than state and local plans. (The main reason of course, being that the Federal Employees Retirement System has shifted more of the burden to the individual to be responsible for retirement savings via the Thrift Savings Plan, while plans at lower levels of government still tend to rely heavily on a pension component.)

The show is archived here, if you're interested.