Brokers Get Rich. The Rich Get Tax Breaks. And the Little Guy Gets No Pension. What's Wrong With 401(k)'s?
The Enron scandal may be the biggest corporate scam in American history, but it's only the tip of the iceberg of a huge corner of the U.S. economy-the pension business. Today pension plans hold nearly $8 trillion of U.S. capital. Half of that amount is taken up by traditional plans in which companies pay workers a set amount from the time of retirement until they die. These accounts are more or less insured by the U.S. government, should a company fail. Another $2 trillion is accounted for by people working in the public sector, and the remaining $2 trillion by the faddish 401(k)'s, which are uninsured and float up or down with the stock market.
It is these private-investor accounts that Employee Benefit News editor Craig Gunsauley defends in his letter to the Voice (see page 6), when he writes: "Job hoppers get zero benefit from a pension plan but can build up a lot of savings in a 401(k)."
These plans have indeed become key to providing income in retirement. The nonprofit Employee Benefit Research Institute estimates 340,000 401(k) plans have been established, with 34 million participants. These plans are taking the place of traditional pensions-even in left-leaning places like the Voice-with the result that workers are losing security in their much touted golden years. "Less than one-third of the public will retire with any kind of pension of consequence," says Paul Edwards, who heads the Coalition for Retirement Security.
In this dismal climate, 401(k) plans are popular because they offer the illusion of controlling one's own assets. This is smoke and mirrors, because the company almost always sets up the fund to serve its own interests. It sets the parameters of what can be bought and-as the Enron case demonstrates-what can be sold and when. And the reporting system can be so Byzantine you need an accounting degree just to figure out whether you are gaining or losing money.
The plans are actually most often run by mutual fund groups or insurance companies. There is little accountability, again as Enron showed. Hidden away in the small print are numerous fees: fees to manage the pension, fees to manage the mutual fund which manages the pension, fees to pay one part of a mutual fund group to provide investment advice to another part of the same group. There are sales fees, redemption fees, and brokerage fees for buying and selling stocks. Brokerage fees can be substantial, since mutual fund managers have been concentrating on short-term investments. Mutual funds sometimes set up alliances with other fund families, which allow them to offer a wider spectrum of funds to invest in. Sometimes funds in these alliances charge each other brokerage fees. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research reports these costs amount to 1.5 percent of the total value of the fund. That might not seem like much, but over several years it can add up.
None of this is to say you can't make money in a bull market if you hit the right mix. But the system has nothing to do with ensuring you a viable pension. And no one really suggests it does. Instead, 401(k)'s benefit upper-level employees who can use the tax advantages. Those tax advantages, amounting to over $330 billion last year, are a subsidy to the well-off and a further drain on programs for our most vulnerable citizens.
One of the reasons 401(k)'s are popular is that they're virtually unregulated. They are nominally controlled by the weakling Department of Labor. It doesn't have the staff to manage the huge pension business, and anyway regulating securities is supposed to be the job of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC in turn has its hands full trying to keep up with the overall markets and thus can scarcely be expected to do much with 401(k)'s. (...)