US. Should We Continue To Count On Employers For Retirement Provision?
Yes, this is a question. It’s not even a rhetorical question. It’s something that I ask myself, and I invite readers to think about.
We take the so-called “three-legged stool” a bit for granted, don’t we? Employers historically provided pension benefits for their employees, in a time and a place when it made sense for them to do so, when they relied on those pensions to scoot aging employees out the door at a traditional normal or even early retirement age, when they perceived of full-career employees as highly valuable, and when the state of funding requirements, longevity expectations, investment and risk attitudes combined together to create the expectation that pensions were a relatively affordable and low-risk means of achieving their business objectives. Now employers have shifted almost universally to 401(k) or other forms of Defined Contribution retirement benefits. But it’s still taken as a given, among those who discuss retirement provision, that employers, second only to the government, should be the chief providers of retirement accruals to workers.
Read More: Forbes
