A History of Public Sector Pensions in the United States


Book Description

From the Wharton School, offering a comprehensive assessment of the political and financial dimensions of public-sector pensions from the colonial period until the emergence of modern retirement plans in the twentieth century.




Failure Masquerading as Success


Book Description

President Lincoln in 1865 said: To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan. This quote was later adapted as the VAs motto. General Omar N Bradleys VA Mission Statement We are dealing with veterans, not procedures- with their problems, not ours has been quoted repeatedly during the seventy five years since. In 1982 President Reagan approved $55.6 million in financial aid toMeharryMedicalCollege. An acute care facility was established atMurfreesboroVAfor training Meharry students. Bob Stump [Rep, Arizona], the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, recently heard that, in some VAs, incompetent managers are not fired on the spot, but instead, reassigned or transferred. The fix was the immediate removal of Konik as the failed director at theSalisburyVAand recycling him as our new director in the summer of 1996. . On Tuesday April 14th, 1998, an E-Mail was disseminated with following quotation: Weak leadership at the York VA Medical Center has prompted changes in the hospitals administration staff, with hospital Director Gene Konik reportedly asking for reassignment, VA officials said. Mr. Dandridge began to initiate his long-term plan for integratingMurfreesboroandNashvilleVA.One of his famous quotations was: Practice, practice makes perfect. Another of his public quotations was: Having theNashvilleVAsurgical residents perform the surgery would provide world-class surgery to the area veterans. . In the last five years, York has seen four different directors. Gordons office has been bombarded with complaints from ailing veterans and their families about lack luster care. Those whove died as a result of the administrative and service changes cant complain anymore. Current York VA Director David Pennington has never spoken to the press about anything, but did send a memo to the medical staff warning them to get online or get out! Our last crop of veterans is dying because of VA medical mismanagement, and our next batch is being loaded onto airplanes to fly back to an uncertain future. Mr. Sullivan, a gulf War I vet and VA project manager stated: This administration is so absolutely corrupt, incompetent and malevolent; it pales anything that came before it. Why is our economy tanking? The war, the war, the war.




Financial Aspects of the United States Pension System


Book Description

This book provides valuable information and analysis to managers, policymakers, and investment counselors in the rapidly expanding field of pension funding. American workers, too, need answers and insights on how to invest their money and plan for their retirement. fifteen of America's leading financial analysts address such pressing questions as -What is the current financial status of the elderly, and how vulnerable are they to inflation? -What is the impact of inflation on the private pension system, and what are the effects of alternative indexing schemes? -What roles can the social security system play in the provision of retirement income? -What is the effect of the tax code and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) on corporate pension policy? -How well funded are corporate pension plans, and is a firm's unfunded pension liability fully reflected in the market value of its common stock? Many of the conclusions these experts reach contradict and challenge popular views, thus providing fertile ground for innovation in pension planning.




The Oxford Handbook of Pensions and Retirement Income


Book Description

This handbook draws on research from a range of academic disciplines to reflect on the implications for provisions of pension and retirement income of demographic ageing. it reviews the latest research, policy related tools, analytical methods and techniques and major theoretical frameworks.







Dismantling Solidarity


Book Description

Why has old-age security become less solidaristic and increasingly tied to risky capitalist markets? Drawing on rich archival data that covers more than fifty years of American history, Michael A. McCarthy argues that the critical driver was policymakers' reactions to capitalist crises and their political imperative to promote capitalist growth.Pension development has followed three paths of marketization in America since the New Deal, each distinct but converging: occupational pension plans were adopted as an alternative to real increases in Social Security benefits after World War II, private pension assets were then financialized and invested into the stock market, and, since the 1970s, traditional pension plans have come to be replaced with riskier 401(k) retirement plans. Comparing each episode of change, Dismantling Solidarity mounts a forceful challenge to common understandings of America’s private pension system and offers an alternative political economy of the welfare state. McCarthy weaves together a theoretical framework that helps to explain pension marketization with structural mechanisms that push policymakers to intervene to promote capitalist growth and avoid capitalist crises and contingent historical factors that both drive them to intervene in the particular ways they do and shape how their interventions bear on welfare change. By emphasizing the capitalist context in which policymaking occurs, McCarthy turns our attention to the structural factors that drive policy change. Dismantling Solidarity is both theoretically and historically detailed and superbly argued, urging the reader to reconsider how capitalism itself constrains policymaking. It will be of interest to sociologists, political scientists, historians, and those curious about the relationship between capitalism and democracy.







The Bureau of Pensions


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Protecting Soldiers and Mothers


Book Description

It is a commonplace that the United States lagged behind the countries of Western Europe in developing modern social policies. But, as Theda Skocpol shows in this startlingly new historical analysis, the United States actually pioneered generous social spending for many of its elderly, disabled, and dependent citizens. During the late nineteenth century, competitive party politics in American democracy led to the rapid expansion of benefits for Union Civil War veterans and their families. Some Americans hoped to expand veterans' benefits into pensions for all of the needy elderly and social insurance for workingmen and their families. But such hopes went against the logic of political reform in the Progressive Era. Generous social spending faded along with the Civil War generation. Instead, the nation nearly became a unique maternalist welfare state as the federal government and more than forty states enacted social spending, labor regulations, and health education programs to assist American mothers and children. Remarkably, as Skocpol shows, many of these policies were enacted even before American women were granted the right to vote. Banned from electoral politics, they turned their energies to creating huge, nation-spanning federations of local women's clubs, which collaborated with reform-minded professional women to spur legislative action across the country. Blending original historical research with political analysis, Skocpol shows how governmental institutions, electoral rules, political parties, and earlier public policies combined to determine both the opportunities and the limits within which social policies were devised and changed by reformers and politically active social groups over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By examining afresh the institutional, cultural, and organizational forces that have shaped U.S. social policies in the past, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers challenges us to think in new ways about what might be possible in the American future.