We were seeing that full-time workers, and at that point they were mostly men, were actually supplementing their social security benefits with employment-based retirement. And the coverage rates at any one point in time was about 70%. Over their careers the likelihood that they would have a supplement was over 80%. And women were catching up. I mean, there was a logic to that two-part system. But by the late 1970s or the early ‘80s, as congress rejected President Carter’s pension commission recommendation of a mandatory universal pension system and accepted a new device developing in the private sector which was built upon a little known section of the tax code called 401(k), we had the marketing of these new income-deferral plans called (after their—the tax code section) 401(k) plans.
The history of these [sic] 401(k) section is actually quite interesting. A large corporation asked the IRS if they could please defer their executives’ compensation directly into a retirement account. And the regulators said, “Well, okay, if you give it to everybody else”. And they presumed that that would never happen, that they wouldn’t extend it down. But it did happen and, to use a shop-worn phrase, the rest is history. You all know the graph. The graph goes something like this.
On this axis is plan participants’ pension plans, whatever you want, and on this axis is time. You know what I mean? The DCs (Defined Contribution) are going up and the DBs (Defined Benefit) are going down. Right? That’s the history we all know. But there’s five other parts of this history that isn’t well advertised. One is that these new DC plans, these new 401(k) plans, never expanded to people who otherwise would not have pension benefits. Every place where 401(k)s have appeared are in industry, firm size or demographic groups that would have gotten the pensions anyway.
Over the past 20 years when you see people newly covered by pension plans, low income workers, people in industries like poultry workers or janitors who all of a sudden have a pension where they didn’t—their counterparts did not have before, it’s a DB plan that they’ve gotten usually through unionization. Now they might have a supplement, but the DB plan is that new coverage. That’s one part of the history we don’t know about that ascendancy.
DC plans going up, pension coverage actually flattening out and falling. The second part of the history we don’t know, that congress, over the past 20 years, treated these 401(k) plans as a favored child, consistently increasing the earnings limits, meting out little discipline on fees or lump sums or other large-scale leakages, while they piled on regulation after regulation on the DB plan as if it were the over-scrutinized older brother. Right? There was this real concerted asymmetry in the way that federal policy treated these two kids of plans.
The third part of the history we don’t know much about is that the replacement rates, the share of pre-retirement income represented by retirement income for future retirees, the research is showing now will be lower than it was for boomers and beyond than the rates have been for previous generations. And the rates predicted for most of us in the room are well below the modest target of 70% of our pre-retirement earnings we should have in retirement. And that target is modest because there was lots of other calculations to show that most of us should have more than 70% of our replacement rate.
The fourth part of that history we don’t know well is the tax expenditures for 401(k) plans. Remember, coverages are increasing, retirement income security is increasing, but the tax subsidies for 401(k) plans are ever increasing, they’ll rise 40 percent from 2004 to 2010, while that older brother, that over scrutinized older brother, the tax advantages for DB plans will fall by four percent.