News Coverage of Pew Report Confirms Texas Doesn’t Have Problems

When the Pew Center on the States released it’s “Widening Gap” report a few weeks back we noted that Texas was nowhere near the worst performers.

Indeed, other critics of the report noted that it used data for investments on June 20, 2009, which was near the bottom of the market. Hank Kim at the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems  and Gerald McEntee of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees made the charge on Special Report with Bret Baier on the day of the report. You can see the video clip here.

We also noted a report on 24/7 Wall Street that used the Pew Report to determine the “10 States Where Pensions Are Running Out of Money.” Texas was not among the states listed, primarily because, as the Pew report noted, our state is very good about making its funding contributions, which enables pensions to keep up with their actuarial obligations.

We want to bring attention to these nuances so that casual readers of pension news don’t use headlines to jump to negative conclusions about pensions here in Texas. Plans are doing well here and now is not the time to fix something that isn’t broken. -- Max Patterson.