The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is out with a new report today—Keeping the Promise: Getting Politics Out of Pensions—highlighting a big but little-known problem plaguing pension systems everywhere: political manipulation. An excerpt from the report: Unfortunately, many lawmakers and pension plan officials have other priorities besides doing what is best for workers. They see...
Last week there was an event in the nation’s capital where a merry band of warriors gathered to bring a dose of sanity to the too often hyperbolic discussion of climate change. While the discussion was thoroughly reasonable, the media had a hard time digesting it. Why? Because this contingent dared to counter decades of fake news often reported on climate and energy.
Last month’s pension summit (Rethinking Retirement: Solutions to Secure Texas’ Public Pension Plans) featured a panel of policymakers, practitioners, and academics seeking to answer the now very obvious question: Are pension problems brewing in the Lone Star State? Hear from our panel on the problems they see looming and some of solutions likely to come...
Last month, the Foundation hosted its first-ever full day summit on pension reform: Rethinking Retirement: Solutions to Secure Texas’ Public Pension Plans. And while the day was filled with a number of terrific panels and presentations, one of the event’s best discussions came as panelists delved into the defined benefit vs. defined contribution debate! Don’t miss it!
Last week, I published an opinion piece in the Austin American-Statesman titled: James Quintero: Texas’ $61 billion pension problem. As it turns out, that $61 billion figure is already out-of-date. Texas’ public pension problems no longer total $61 billion, but have instead grown to more than $63 billion according to new figures from the Pension...
Local government debt grew by several billion dollars this year, according to new data from the Texas Bond Review Board (BRB). According to the BRB, local debt service outstanding—or “the amount that is required to cover the repayment of principal and interest on a debt” held by political subdivisions—rose to more than $342 billion in...
Death by queueing is the inevitable result of government control of healthcare spending.
Texas’ public employees deserve a safe and secure retirement, but many are instead faced with uncertainty as some of the state’s biggest public retirement systems deal with problems brought on by years of habitual overpromising and underfunding.
Legislators this session should support more prosperity achieved in Texas by further freeing markets from government intervention so limited taxpayer dollars fund core government provisions.
Manufacturing as a share of real GDP in America has hovered around 12 percent since 1960, even as manufacturing’s share of employment has dropped by about a quarter due to a steady increase in productivity. But, what if corporate America brings even half of the more than $2 trillion it has stashed overseas and invests it at home under more favorable tax treatment?
Public pension reform should be a high-priority for the next legislature, for both the sake of retirees and taxpayers. Alarming new data shows that Texas’ public retirement systems are not faring well. The Pension Review Board (PRB) is out with a new report, Actuarial Valuations Report for November 2016, pegging public pension debt at more...
The 2016-17 Texas biennial state budget is $209.9 billion. The largest item, $77.2 billion, goes to Health and Human Services (HHS). Sixty-two billion dollars of the HHS budget — 30 percent of all Texas spending — is consumed by the Texas Medicaid program.