Comment by lenerdenator
2 days ago
It's not about fault, it's about providing better than you got for your children and grandchildren. If you - and the people compensated with the same equities that fund your pension - are putting substantial downward pressure on earnings for the current generation of laborers and it's having all sorts of knock-on effects, you're failing to provide better for those coming after you.
You can’t solve that by taking away existing pensions. If that’s your preferred method of balancing budgets then expect no sympathy when your company cancels your RSUs
> can’t solve that by taking away existing pensions
Of course you can. Pensions are a form of debt. If the state is bankrupt, it's reasonable to trim its creditors. Pensioners included. (The politically-savvy way to do this is probably to spin off the pension fund as its own entity and then default on bonds, which the pension fund would hold alongside others. Then leave it to the pensioners to figure out how they haircut themselves.)
You could also raise taxes as an alternative. I realize this won't be popular with some, however its not unreasonable, depending on how you do it.
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> You can’t solve that by taking away existing pensions.
Of course you can, especially when you look at the public debt racked up by the generation that is now retiring. Now, there will likely be consequences come election time, but math is math. The current generation of retirees spent too much and did too little to cover the costs over their working lives.
> If that’s your preferred method of balancing budgets then expect no sympathy when your company cancels your RSUs
I don't have RSUs at my current job. A significant plurality, if not majority, of laborers today don't either. If you're making $50k doing clerical work, have no RSUs at the company, and the company is having to make all sorts of cuts to meet pension obligations, what do you care about equities and their effects on current retirees?
At the job that I had that did have RSUs, I got about $3k, pre-tax, for all of them when the company was acquired by Oracle after about four years of cancelling raises, downsizing, and restructuring. I would have been far better off if that time had been spent by management giving COLA raises, if nothing else, given that this coincided with the COVID housing price and consumer goods inflation trend.
RSUs only really matter if you get a metric crapload of them, whether over decades or as a part of your compensation package, and only executives get that kind of volume.