Watch Out 2025! Pensions, Finance, Mortality Trends, Fraud, and the Train Chugs On

Did you think it would stop?

2-year-old Meep plans her Project 2025, accompanied by Ma

Happy New Year!

Yeah, I’m happy to have 2024 behind me. It sucked.

Mind you, 2025 will be great for this substack inasmuch I will have plenty to write and talk (and graph) about.

Pensions

Ongoing issues

• Chicago and Illinois pensions

• Ohio STRS

• Alternative assets and investment policies

AWOL in 2024, to return?

• Multiemployer pensions

• Retirement age in France (and other countries?)

• Social Security

New issues?

• Church pensions

As noticed in my STUMP top posts for 2024, I dropped a few topics in media res due to Stuart’s death. There will be some that I’ll be jumping on right away in January, but others will be at a slow boil until the next major event.

Chicago (and Illinois) are perennially under fiscal stress, made worse by the Pritzker-Johnson combo. This ain’t no Daley-Edgar (and that caused trouble enough). The pensions aren’t the only part, but they are a large part of the problem.

Ohio STRS is continuing its own drama. I will be doing an update on that soon.

Then there is the issue of what public pension assets will do as so many public pension portfolios are crammed full of alternative assets and the yield curve is un-inverting by long-term interest rates increasing. Some funds have stronger oversight than others. We’ve seen this story a decade ago.

Those are all topics I know will be covered in 2025. What about the others?

Multiemployer pensions got their bailout under the Biden administration. But there has been trouble bubbling under the hood. That may not erupt in 2025, though.

The retirement age in France (and other countries) was big news in 2023. Maybe that will come back as various European countries are in a roil. We’ll see.

Social Security didn’t get much play in 2024, but had a last-minute whack in boosting benefits to people who had supposedly opted out for most of their working years. I will have something to say about that specific benefit increase. The question is whether there will be any other recognition of the weakness of the Social Security system this year.

Finally, maybe a new item. I had posted about Vatican pensions in 2024 as well as the Diocese of Washington, but I may increase posting about church pensions in 2025 (and not only Catholic pensions, but they will likely be the largest group.) Church pensions are exempted from ERISA in the U.S., like public pensions, so they have no protections either. There may be multiple groups finding problems, due to generational issues in terms of demographics as well as reduction in church-going and donations.

Public Finance

Ongoing issues

• Chicago and Illinois

• New York (state and city)

Returning issues

• SALT cap (whee!)

New issues

• DOGE

There will likely be more coming into these categories, but for right now, yes, I will continue beating up on Chicago, Illinois, and New York.

With the sunsetting of Trump’s 2017 tax bill items, we will see the fight over the SALT cap again, and I know my Representative, Mike Lawler, will be in the fray.

I’m a SALT CAP ZERO! supporter, but also, that’s a very unpopular stance. Especially here in Westchester.

Vivek & Elon’s DOGE is a new player this year, and it’s a real wild card. I have no idea if it will be touching on any of the long-term or structural public finance issues that I look at, or just nibble at the edges. Maybe they will be Lords of Chaos. We will see.

Back on the old STUMP, I used to do Friday Trumpery for dumbass Trump-related things, and DOGE may take the place of that. Or it may get boring to me really rapidly.

Here’s a related Friday Trumpery from 2017: Friday Trumpery: DEY TOOK OUR ACTUARIAL JERRRRRBS

So one of the big issues from the Trump admin is immigration, especially with regards to the DEY TOOK ERR JERRRRRRRBS aspect.

For the longest time, people assumed these jobs being taken were more of the nasty “jobs Americans won’t do”, but the argument was there were “jobs Americans can’t do” because it required very specific skill sets.

Like the skill of getting paid half of what American citizens or green card holders would demand.

LET’S HEAR IT FROM ENGINEERS

Commentary: The H-1B Visa Problem as IEEE-USA Sees It:

For example, you point out that, according to H-1BPay.com, Facebook pays its software engineers in Menlo Park, on average, US $138,294, which is a pretty good salary. However, Smartorg pays software engineers on H-1B visas in Menlo Park only $80,000 annually, which is a ridiculously low salary for the San Jose region.

This difference illustrates an important point about H-1B visas. While some companies pay their H-1B employees’ salaries equivalent to what American workers get paid, many companies do not. In fact, most H-1B visas are used, not by Facebook and other big tech companies, but by outsourcing and consulting companies.

And the salaries paid by those companies tell a different story.

For example, Wipro, a large outsourcing company, paid its 104 program analysts in San Jose exactly $60,000 each in 2016. Brocade, in contrast, paid their programmer analysts $130,000 in the same city.
…..
What’s the difference? Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, and Tata are all outsourcing companies. Their business model involves using H-1B visas to bring low-cost workers into the United States and then renting those workers to other companies. Their competitive advantage is price. That is, they make their money by renting their workers for less than companies would have to pay American workers.

This is the real story of the H-1B visa. It is a tool used by companies to avoid hiring American workers, and avoid paying American wages. For every visa used by Google to hire a talented non-American for $126,000, ten Americans are replaced by outsourcing companies paying their H-1B workers $65,000.

This is why, IEEE-USA opposes efforts to expand the H-1B visa program.

So here’s the deal.

Every time I hear bitching & moaning about lack of STEM workers, once upon a time, I believed that there was a skill lack.

Now I realize that there was a “lack” of cheap STEM workers.

That was March 2017. Not this year.

Yes, we were talking H1Bs back in 2017. I know others have the memory of a gnat, but I don’t. I remembered looking into this stuff back then, because I looked at the databases then. Things have changed since 2017, for a variety of reasons. I will probably not address this, but we’ll see.

Mortality

Ongoing issues

• 2023 wrap-up

• 2024 development

• Cause-of-death spotlights — Cancer, drug overdoses, motor vehicle accidents, suicide

• Age group analyses

Returning issues

• Mortality improvement? Longevity?

• Retirement ages

• Fraud (pension fraud)

New issues

• Heart disease deep dive

• Multiple causes of death

There’s not much to say here, other than I have more time now to do videos and graphs. I’m not driving to the cancer center so much, etc.

I’m still waiting for CDC WONDER to be updated (because I’m lazy… I don’t want to change how I do my spreadsheets) with the finalized 2023 data. The results will be close to what I have already seen, but I want to put the 2023 data to bed.

Once that is done, I will have a series of posts based on my core deck on U.S. mortality that I give as a presentation to actuarial meetings. I will also do posts on how mortality has changed for specific age groups since 2019. An example is here:

I will update that with the 2023 data.

And yes, I will be updating the core organizational mortality post. Substack isn’t really built up for the type of website structure I like, but right now I’m not prioritizing fixing up websites. Stu used to do that for me, so I will have to figure this stuff out now.

But moving on to new things, two things I want to look at that I’ve not done a deep dive into yet: heart disease (the top cause of death in the U.S.) and multiple causes of death. Both of these are complicated subjects, so I may have to pick some specific approaches before doing comprehensive looks.

I may also be bringing back more stories of pension fraud, given the popularity of fraud stories. I do see them in my pension news feed, and the Comptroller of New York State, Thomas DiNapoli, puts out press releases every time he has been involved in uncovering such fraud, no matter how small. It’s good to see examples.

More Ideas?

I’m always open to more ideas, but keep in mind sometimes I sit on sources and thoughts for years before they sprout. I have been writing STUMP specifically since 2014, after all. I’ve been blogging about policy for years longer than that.

Paying subscribers can comment on this post (the main benefit of being a paying subscriber), but one can always email me: marypat.campbell@gmail.com, or tweet at me on X: @meepbobeep (no, my DMs are not open. You can @ me in public, like a normal person. I read public messages.)