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Politics : View from the Center and Left
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To: Lane3 who wrote (72041)6/13/2008 8:25:14 PM
From: JohnM  Read Replies (1) of 542619
 
The experience of countries which have used the tax system to subsidise the growth of private pension plans (Australia, Canada, Ireland, the UK and the US) shows that the average cost of their tax benefits for private pensions relative to GDP has doubled in the last twenty years. It also shows that in Ireland, the UK and the US tax reliefs for private pensions cost more than means-tested pensions for the poorest old people and that tax reliefs for private pensions are inequitable as most of the benefits accrue to taxpayers at the top of the income distribution and very little to those at the bottom.

And:

Intergenerational Equity.
Reforms of pay-as-you-go pension systems were often justified by their ability to make each cohort bear the cost of the increase in its life expectancy. This actuarially based concept of equity ignores the unequal social and economic outcomes experienced by different cohorts over the course of their life cycle. It is argued that these inequalities can only be addressed by public pay-as-you-go pension systems which involve redistribution between generations. Pay-as-you-go systems have the potential for a transparent, democratic decision-making process and assessment of pension choices which contrasts with market based pension systems where the collective fate of different cohorts is subject to random swings in financial markets.

I take this argument to mean that public subsidies for private pension systems increase income inequalities while what the writers term "pay-as-you-go pension systems" actually "address" exacerbated income inequalities because they have "the potential for a transparent, democratic decision-making process. . . "

Appears to me it makes my point.

I gather this is the introduction to a collection of essays justifying public pensions. I certainly hope the essays are better written than this introduction.
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