School districts and state agencies face another major hike in their payments to the Oregon Public Employees Retirement System during the two-year budget cycle starting July 1, 2027, according to new projections released last week.
The tab for individual public employers won’t be clear until December, when system actuary Milliman Inc. releases projected pension contribution rates for each of the system’s 900 participating employers for the next biennium. And those rates won’t be set in stone until next year, when the actuary knows how much the system’s investments earned in 2025.
Service Union Employees International Union 503 boss Melissa Unger speaks at the Oregon Capitol in support of a $4.3 billion tax increase passed by the legislature last month.
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The timing of the latest financial projections from the Oregon Public Employees Retirement System, as reported by The Oregonian’s Ted Sickinger, could not have been more appropriate.
As the Oregon Legislature was inching toward the conclusion of a special session it claimed was necessary to ensure continuance of basic road maintenance, the actuary for the PERS system issued preliminary estimates of investment earnings and required contributions by public employers indicating that the state is going to need a lot more money unless it finds a way to reduce pension obligations or operate more efficiently.
Whether your political preferences lean left or right or reside in the middle, the report should scare you. Unless the Legislature is able to accomplish one of three difficult things, the state’s descent toward the bottom of national rankings is likely to pick up speed. Here’s a look at each one, all fraught with risk.
Raise taxes more, probably a lot more.
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Enact further PERS reforms
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Downsize state and local government
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This is a problem that has been building for a more than a half century. Aside from occasional efforts to make minor fixes that at best slowed the bleeding, the Legislature has chosen to ignore the problem and hope for a miracle cure in the form of outsized investment gains. But despite record stock-market gains over most of that period, the day of reckoning finally appears upon us. And, as usually happens when one delays necessary treatment, the patient already is in critical condition.
I note with great emphasis: “We do not possess thorough look through ability.”
That’s the first time I’ve ever heard those confusing words. Here’s a translation:
State pension fiduciaries have failed to demand that external investment managers disclose to the pension on a timely basis all investments, including but not limited to crypto, in their funds’ portfolios.
State pension fiduciaries have failed to disclose to Oregonians information they don’t possess regarding the pension’s riskiest investments.
State pension fiduciaries cannot be monitoring the risks related to crypto investments they do not know they own.
Bad enough that the Oregon State Treasury is gambling $60 billion in high-cost, high-risk alternative funds. State officials don’t know—and apparently don’t even care—what’s in those funds.
A Delaware Chancery Court has appointed pension funds from New York City and from Oregon as the lead plaintiffs in a shareholder lawsuit that alleges Fox Corp. breached its fiduciary duty by exposing itself to defamation lawsuits during its coverage of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
In September 2023, New York City’s five public pension funds, as well as the Oregon Investment Council and the Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund, filed shareholder derivative lawsuits against Fox for breach of fiduciary duty. The lawsuits allege Fox’s board of directors knew that Fox News was promoting former President Donald Trump’s false claims that he was the true winner of the 2020 election without regard for whether the assertions were true and thus created significant exposure to defamation charges.
In April, Fox settled a $787 million defamation lawsuit brought by the voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems after Fox broadcasters falsely alleged Dominion was involved in altering results during the 2020 presidential election. Fox also faces a $2.7 billion lawsuit from voting machine company Smartmatic USA Corp.
The Oregon Public Employee Retirement System (PERS) pension fund has been in the national spotlight recently because of risks from private investments hidden from the public. What risks? Risk to public employees’ retirement, risk to taxpayers who have to pick up the shortfall, risk to workers as private equity asset managers rake in huge profits at Oregonians’ expense, risk to all Oregonians as private equity undermines our communities, and risk to the climate as private equity firms are uniquely exposed to fossil fuel companies.
A recent article in the business section of The New York Times, “The Risks Hidden in Public Pension Funds,” focuses on the Oregon treasury’s unusually large private investments in PERS. The treasury has long hailed its private equity investments for producing high rates of return, overlooking warning signs that the managers report earnings that turn out to be overstated. The Times reported, “they aren’t taking account of the true risks embedded in private equity. Oregon’s pension fund is over 40% more volatile than its own reported statistics show.”
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Divest Oregon’s 2022 report, “Oregon Treasury’s Private Investment Transparency Problem,” documents that more than 50% of PERS is in private investments, with various labels (“private equity,” “alternatives,” “opportunity,” even real estate).
These private funds are heavily invested in coal, oil and gas. The treasury increased its investments in fossil fuels in private investments from 2021 to 2022 (the most recent data released by the state) and continues to invest billions in the fossil fuel industry in 2023, for example in the private investment firm GNP. While Divest Oregon applauds Treasurer Tobias Read in his work to create a “decarbonization plan” for PERS, the treasurer must respond to calls to stop new private investments that fund the climate crisis.
Author(s): State Sen. Jeff Golden and state Reps. Khanh Pham and Mark Gamba
In several Republican-led states, the officials who oversee pension funds for millions of state workers are being told, or may soon be told, to ignore the financial risks associated with a warming world. There’s something distinctly anti-free market about policymakers limiting investment professionals’ choices — and it’s putting the retirement savings of millions at risk.
The Texas comptroller, Glenn Hegar, recently announced that 10 financial firms and 348 funds could be barred from doing business with the state’s pension plans because they appeared to consider environmental risks in their investment decisions regarding the fossil fuel industry. The day before, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida announced a similar move. Other states, including Idaho, Louisiana and West Virginia, have either taken or are thinking of taking similar actions, which amount to ideological litmus tests that will likely result in lower returns for pensioners.
Bills that would have ended the last state-level bans on adults pumping their own gas in Oregon and New Jersey both flamed out this year. A new study purports to show how much the failure of reform is costing drivers.
In March, the Oregon Legislature adjourned without passing a bill allowing gas stations all over the Beaver State to make some of their pumps self-service. Self-service pumps are currently only allowed in smaller rural counties.
Over in New Jersey, another bill similarly allowing gas stations to have some self-service pumps stalled after legislative leaders came out against it in March, reports NJ.com.
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By not wanting to take on the political and regulatory costs of reform, politicians from both states are forcing the costs of higher gas prices onto motorists. That’s according to a new study from Clemson University’s Vitor Melo which finds that bans on self-service gas stations reduce supply and drive up prices.
In 2018, Oregon implemented a slight reform of its full-service mandate by allowing gas stations in counties of 40,000 or fewer people to have self-service pumps. Melo’s study used daily gas prices for all gas stations in the state reported to the website Gas Buddy between 2016 and 2019 to tease out what impact the repeal of self-service had on gas prices.
After controlling for counties’ levels of unemployment, poverty, and median income, Melo finds that allowing self-service saw gas prices drop in the affected counties by 4.4 cents per gallon. The price decline nets out to $90 a year for a household with three drivers.
A new study is pouring cold beer on Seattle’s soda tax. The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, reveals that since the city I call home adopted a soda tax in 2018, residents have swapped out soda and replaced that soda with beer. Pointedly, the study says Seattle’s soda tax “induced” consumers to buy more beer.
“The good people of Seattle responded to a tax on sugary drinks by buying more beer,” Christopher Snowdon, director of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs and a leading critic of the nanny state, tweeted after the study’s release.
The PLoS study, by University of Illinois-Chicago researchers Lisa M. Powell and Julien Lader, compared sales of beer in Seattle both before and since adoption of the soda tax with comparable sales in nearby Portland, Oregon, which has no soda tax.
Oregon’s public pension fund, which manages tens of billions of dollars in retirement savings, appears to have privately given its blessing to a 2019 deal by an investment fund to acquire NSO Group, the controversial spyware company.
A source with close knowledge of the matter and emails seen by the Guardian suggest that a senior official at the pension fund signalled his strong support for the takeover of NSO as early as 2018, months before the deal was announced.
Last month, Oregon officials said they were “deeply disturbed” by reports that NSO Group “enabled widespread human rights violations”.
In the face of the pandemic, states across the geographic and political spectrum — including Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, New Mexico and New York — are actively considering tobacco tax increases during their legislative sessions. Last month, a bipartisan supermajority in the Maryland Legislature moved to increase the state’s cigarette tax by $1.75 per pack, the first increase in nearly a decade, and to establish a tax on e-cigarettes to fund tobacco cessation and health programs.
The growing legislative momentum comes after voters in Colorado and Oregon approved tobacco tax increases in ballot measures last November. Colorado, which had not raised tobacco taxes in 16 years, will collect an estimated $175 million in revenue during the 2021-22 budget year for tobacco cessation and health programs. In Oregon, higher tobacco taxes will generate an estimated $160 million per year and help to fund the care of people with mental illnesses and other conditions.
Author(s): NANCY BROWN, AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION
The federal stimulus checks helped a lot of Oregonians out when they needed it. And it is also going to help out Oregon government — about $100 million in federal stimulus payments is going to wind up in the state treasury.
The federal government is not taxing the stimulus payments. In Oregon, they are not taxed as income, either. But the payments can impact the federal tax calculations used on your Oregon income tax. And so the stimulus payment may mean you owe state tax on more of your income and wind up paying more taxes or get a reduced refund.
Does that sound right to you? The stimulus checks sure seemed to be aimed at helping individuals, not helping state government.
The U.S. vaccine campaign has heightened tensions between rural and urban America, where from Oregon to Tennessee to upstate New York complaints are surfacing of a real — or perceived — inequity in vaccine allocation.
In some cases, recriminations over how scarce vaccines are distributed have taken on partisan tones, with rural Republican lawmakers in Democrat-led states complaining of “picking winners and losers,” and urbanites traveling hours to rural GOP-leaning communities to score COVID-19 shots when there are none in their city.
In Oregon, state GOP lawmakers walked out of a Legislative session last week over the Democratic governor’s vaccine plans, citing rural vaccine distribution among their concerns. In upstate New York, public health officials in rural counties have complained of disparities in vaccine allocation and in North Carolina, rural lawmakers say too many doses were going to mass vaccine centers in big cities.
