Hacker Cinema
The Pension Gamble
2018 · Film · documentary · 53 min
This 2018 documentary investigates the role of state governments and Wall Street in driving America’s public pensions into a multi-trillion-dollar hole. Producers Marcela Gaviria and Nick Verbitsky and correspondent Martin Smith trace how state governments have withheld pension contributions to cover shortfalls and waged risky bets on Wall Street. Smith goes inside the volatile fight over pensions in Kentucky, a state whose once-flush pension system for its police, firefighters, teachers and other public workers became one of the worst-funded in the nation.
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This was covered well in a PBS Frontline documentary, "The Pension Gamble":
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/the-pension-gamble/
And also in their followup, "The Retirement Gamble":
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/retirement-gamble/
Both can also be found on YouTube.
I rewatched both just a few months ago, to understand the history a bit better. The short answer is that eliminating pensions was part of a larger restructuring in corporate America, wherein major companies that became megacaps in the 20th century used the Chapter 11 bankruptcy rules as a shield to eliminate employee pensions, while the burgeoning consumer finance industry of the 1980s and 1990s was all too eager to create a new fee-generating monster in the form of 401ks.
These days, 401ks with low fee index funds are the only sane retirement tool available to middle-class workers, but much like US employer-sponsored healthcare, the system is about 10x more complex and 10x more precarious than it otherwise could be, and it benefits all sorts of ridiculous middleman paper-pushing rent-seeking corporations along the way.
Unfortunately, a lot of pension funds are behind so the started taking more risk. Frontline did a good piece called "The Pension Gamble" on this: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/the-pension-gamble/