Federal Pensions Research Articles

Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later ed. by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis

Reviewed by: Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later ed. by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis Robert D. Bland (bio) Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later. Edited by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Cloth, $125.00; paper, $35.00.) Freedoms Gained and Lost enters a rich and robust public conversation over the current meaning of the Reconstruction era. Edited by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis, the collection of essays emerged from the 2018 Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World conference that commemorated the 150th anniversary of South Carolina’s 1868 constitution—a powerful document that expressed a deep faith in the promise of multiracial democracy in the United States. Covering a wide geographical and chronological terrain, the essays in Freedoms Gained and Lost, read together, offer a shift away from the “splendid failure” narrative that has largely defined the field of Reconstruction studies for the last three decades. Far from a story of incremental progress or heroic struggle, Freedoms Gained and Lost highlights the “limits to [the] radical experiment” (2), as well as the “uniquely baleful influences” that doomed the effort (5). In the book’s introduction, Domby and Lewis see the uneven and harrowing nature of the road to freedom as the unifying theme of the Reconstruction era. “Focusing solely on the serial expansion of freedom obscures the way freedoms have been gained and lost repeatedly in American history—and the complex struggles [End Page 271] to maintain them,” they lament. The essays in this volume were written in the shadow of the 2015 Charleston Mother Emanuel AME Church shooting and the violent 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, and a well-earned weariness permeates the collection and informs the skepticism toward the previous generation’s more hopeful historiographical synthesis. Speaking to both historiographical debates and Reconstruction’s place in U.S. public history, Bruce E. Baker’s thoughtful “Whom Is Reconstruction For?” seeks to tackle the longer history of Reconstruction’s usable past. “The emergence of a ‘Third Reconstruction’ can be seen as an abandonment of the hopes of the ‘Second Reconstruction,’” Baker argues, “but it is equally a hopeful marker of the beginning of something” (22). Reflecting on the polyphonic nature of Reconstruction’s memory and the varying interpretations in family lore, local communities, textbooks, digital history projects, and the elite press, the essay turns to the critical question: did any of these usable pasts have a stable center? Drawing from the work of southern labor historians, Baker suggests that Reconstruction’s usable past—especially in its “Second Reconstruction” and “Third Reconstruction” iterations—calls upon working-class people to work across barriers of race and age to build a better world. Most of the essays in the collection diverge from Baker’s hopeful synthesis and, when read in total, present the Reconstruction era as a moment of mixed promise and Pyrrhic victory. Hilary N. Green’s essay on Alabama’s postbellum education system dampens the usual optimism around the rise of Black schools in the South by highlighting the distance between imagined policy and the difficult work of implementation. Michael W. Fitzgerald’s essay on Black militias in Alabama’s western Black Belt finds a culture of Black armed resistance that bolstered local chapters of the Republican Party against recalcitrant Ku Klux Klan violence—albeit in a larger political landscape wherein the statewide Republican Party lost control of the statehouse. Holly A. Pinheiro Jr.’s essay on northern-born soldiers serving in the United States Colored Troops demonstrates that, for many veterans, the homecoming experience was fraught with lingering trauma, discriminatory labor markets, and difficulty securing federal pensions at the same rates as their white peers. Examining postbellum infanticide cases in the North and the South, Felicity Turner finds a discriminatory and racist legal system, which demonstrated that the much-heralded new civil rights protections “proved messy and complicated for Black women across the nation” (137). In addition to shifting away from stories that champion the push for civil rights and the imaginative and flexible nature of grassroots democracy, [End Page 272] Freedoms Gained and Lost points to...

Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South

Brandi Clay Brimmer's Claiming Union Widowhood examines how African American military widows fought to receive federal pensions in the decades after the American Civil War. In her deeply researched and persuasively argued book, Brimmer offers a grassroots view of how Black women asserted their claims to citizenship, civil rights, and “worthy widowhood” in the face of persistent racial and sexual prejudice (1).Brimmer builds on the works of historians who have documented how the Civil War pension system foreshadowed the social welfare programs of the twentieth century. Originating in 1862, with substantial revisions in 1879 and 1890, the pension system commanded up to 45 percent of the federal budget at its apex. Although popular with Union veterans, the pension remained politically contentious throughout the late nineteenth century. As Brimmer notes, though, the federal pension system was not designed with emancipated African Americans in mind. Denied access to legal marriage in slavery, Black widows faced challenges documenting and legitimizing their marital relationships. They also often lacked access to the kind of medical records necessary to document their husband's war wounds. Moreover, Black conceptions of marriage and family did not always fit into the Pension Bureau's narrow definitions. Brimmer argues that African Americans saw marriage as a hallmark of freedom and key component of their claims to citizenship, yet also continued to embrace a malleable understanding of marriage and family, shaped by the brutality of slavery and by the need to mitigate the impact of poverty in freedom. The federal pension provided only very modest payments, but for poor widows, they offered a necessary lifeline.Brimmer's study draws on a close reading of thirteen hundred pension files from Craven County, North Carolina. Occupied by Union forces under Ambrose Burnside in 1862, the city of New Bern and the adjacent community of James City (which grew out of a wartime refugee camp) became sites of intense Black politics and community activism during and after the Civil War. During Reconstruction, it was the epicenter of the “Black Second” congressional district, which elected four African Americans to seven terms until a violent white supremacist campaign in 1898 intimidated and disenfranchised most Black voters. This political and social community provides an important backdrop for the Brimmer's examination of Black military widows.Brimmer's approach allows for the experience of a few individual Black women to come into focus. Using their pension records and other records, Brimmer illuminates the lives of Charlotte Banks, Mary Lee, Louisa Powers, and Fanny Whitney. These women (and dozens others like them) struggled to persuade pension bureaucrats about the legitimacy of their claims and their worthiness to receive modest pension payments. To help them navigate the complex bureaucracy, Black women in New Bern turned to a pair of pension professionals, Edward W. Carpenter and Frederick C. Douglass. Carpenter, a white lawyer, and Douglass, the son of a US Colored Troops widow, helped them craft applications to meet the Pension Bureau's requirements and file appeals when their applicants were denied or their pensions withdrawn. Brimmer emphasizes the role of the broader community in the pension process: friends, neighbors, and veterans provided important testimony to document the widows’ family relationships, their husbands’ military service, and their worthiness for a pension.Black widows faced constant threats that their pensions would be taken away. Fears that the system would be abused dominated the political conversation over the federal pension throughout its history, and Black pensioners faced more than their fair share of fraud accusations. Brimmer documents extensive surveillance of Black women in New Bern by pension agents. If they remarried, had children after the death of their soldier husband, or engaged in behavior that the Pension Bureau officials deemed immoral, they risked losing their pension. Black military widows fought vigorously to preserve their pensions, turning to the broader community to support their claims.In the book's conclusion, Brimmer provocatively draws connections between the struggles of Black women to secure pensions in the late nineteenth century and those faced by military widows and welfare rights activists in the twentieth century. She argues that persistent “racialized gender inequalities and class biases that stigmatized black women” have shaped federal policy and limited Black women's civil rights and citizenship (213).Claiming Union Widowhood is an important contribution that speaks to several significant historiographical conversations. Historians interested in the long history of emancipation, the African American family, the Black military experience, and Civil War veterans would benefit from reading this excellent study. It sheds new light on the relationship between race, gender, and poverty in Reconstruction and afterward that should inspire future research.

“Justice Has a Compensation”: The Ex-Slave Public and Federal Pensions, 1890–1935

This article examines the grassroots activities of poor, elderly ex-slaves and their descendants for reparative justice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through petitions to government officials and membership in ex-slave organizations, these Black men and women publicly reimagined “ex-slave” as a patriotic, hard-working, and entitled status worthy of government benefits already extended to Civil War veterans and their widows. Their campaign for a federal pension opened a new sphere of African American politics during an era of disenfranchisement that demonstrated how the most vulnerable people in a postslavery society could organize for reparative justice. These unlikely activists faced challenges from government agencies, politicians, and other Black leaders who sought to relegate slavery and the experiences of formerly enslaved people to the margins of a modern US society. Their efforts to cohere an “ex-slave public” has, nevertheless, inspired subsequent generations to seek reparative justice.

Harper and Its Aftermath

In Davis v. Michigan Department of Treasury, the Supreme Court ruled that states may not tax the pensions of former federal workers without imposing a like tax on the retirement income of former state employees. Noting that Michigan had agreed to refund the state income taxes Paul Davis had paid on his federal pension over the years in controversy, the Court stated that he was entitled to a refund. It then remanded the case to allow the Michigan courts and state lawmakers to determine how state and federal retirees were to be treated equally in the future-both taxed according to the same schedule or exempted from tax-and to resolve the thousands of refund claims by federal pensioners that had been or might be filed.Davis provoked a whirlwind of activity in state courts and legislatures across the country, because two dozen states taxed state retirement income more lightly than federal pensions, contrary to the Supreme Court's understanding of the doctrine of intergovernmental tax immunity. Davis left no doubt that states must equalize the taxation of federal and state retirees following the issuance of the Court's opinion. But the Court's bare mention of Michigan's concession to refund Davis's taxes failed to answer clearly the question of whether states owed some form of retroactive relief to all similarly situated federal retirees who had paid higher taxes than had state pensioners. Not surprisingly, in view of the number of courts that issued rulings, the enormous sums at stake, and the confusion swirling around the Supreme Court's recent retroactivity rulings, state courts disagreed over whether the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause mandates a remedy for past wrongs. Many, including Virginia's Supreme Court, concluded that Davis established a requirement of equal treatment solely for the future. Accordingly, they refused to order refunds to federal retirees or to impose a retroactive tax on state pensions to secure equality after the fact.

Supporting Growth, Restoring Confidence: A Shadow Federal Budget for 2020

Early 2020 presents Canada with two challenges: amenic economic growth, and nervousness about the federal government’s fiscal stewardship. The C.D. Howe Institute’s Shadow Federal Budget for 2020 addresses both. It contains a number of measures to improve the rewards from work, saving and investment – initiatives that will support near-term spending and job creation, and raise Canada's growth prospects and opportunities over time. It also contains measures that will enhance the efficiency of federal revenue collection, control spending, and eliminate federal government borrowing by the end of the projection period – initiatives that will give Canadians confidence in their national finances. Highlights of the 2020 Shadow Budget’s measures to support economic growth are changes to personal and corporate income taxes that will encourage talent and investment, elimination of distorting taxes and border frictions, more focused infrastructure investments, and measures to support Canada’s labour market. The Shadow Budget would foster opportunity and well-being by supporting saving for, and income in, retirement, establishing more generous treatment for medical expenses, supporting charitable giving, and implementing a more growth-friendly strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with a new GST rate on motive fuels. It would further support fiscal sustainability through new regimes for federal estimates, federal employee pensions and compensation, levelling the playing field for taxation of digital services, and rationalizing ineffective tax expenditures. The result is a fiscal framework that will support growth now and in the future, and let Canadians work, save and invest with confidence, knowing that the federal government is dealing successfully with the country's longer-term challenges.

Retiring Employees, Unretired Debt: The Surprising Hidden Cost of Federal Employee Pensions

Ottawa provides its employees with defined-benefit pensions that promise relatively generous benefits to a large current and former workforce. Being largely unfunded, these plans require future taxpayer support. They also create taxpayer risk because the economic value of the benefits they will provide can fluctuate by tens of billions of dollars annually. Current accounting practices understate this burden and the risks these plans create for taxpayers and, potentially, for the employees themselves. Official figures on the current cost of these plans and their accumulated obligations are based on notional interest rates that are too high for this kind of commitment. Since pension promises are guaranteed by taxpayers and indexed to inflation, the appropriate rate for discounting the value of future payments should be the yield on federal-government real-return bonds (RRB), which for years has been much lower than the assumed rate in official figures. Correcting this distortion would produce a fair-value estimate of $245.9 billion for Ottawa's unfunded pension liability at the end of 2016/17 – around $27,000 per family of four and $96 billion higher than the reported number. Because the unfunded pension liability is part of Ottawa’s debt, applying this fair-value adjustment raises the net public debt from the $631.9 billion reported at the end 2016/17 to an adjusted $727.9 billion. Recent federal pension reforms raised participants’ share of the funding costs for these plans: for the main Public Service Plan, the reforms aimed at a 50:50 split between contributions from participants and contributions from the government as employer. Still, using notional interest rates that are higher than the appropriate ones means that the reported costs of these plans – and, therefore, the contribution rates that determine participants’ shares – are too low. Even the higher employee contributions anticipated by the reforms would leave the taxpayers’ true share far above 50 percent. A fair-value approach to the current service cost would ensure that participants and taxpayers share equally the actual cost of accruing benefits. Even 50:50 sharing of federal pensions’ actual costs as they accrue would leave taxpayers exposed to fluctuations in the value of previously earned benefits. Ottawa could protect taxpayers from this risk by capping employer contributions at a fixed share of pensionable pay. To relieve taxpayers of their current sole responsibility for risks in the federal plans, Ottawa would need to switch to a different type of plan with benefits based not only on salary and years of service but also on the plans’ funded status. Such plans, already common in much of the provincial public sector, have a variety of labels – shared-risk and target-benefit are two common ones. Their common feature is that when things do not go as expected, the plan sponsor and the employees share the costs and benefits of the new reality. More economically meaningful reporting of the plans’ benefit values and their cost to taxpayers would foster improvements in Canada’s retirement saving and income system generally. And it would foster reforms that would provide federal employees with better-funded pensions and taxpayers with protection against risks too few know they face.

Pensions and Protest: Former Slaves and the Reconstructed American State

Pensions and ProtestFormer Slaves and the Reconstructed American State Dale Kretz (bio) A chilling wind tore through central Georgia in the winter of 1865. Huddled in tents near Atlanta was the 138th U.S. Colored Troops, organized nearby just months before. One of the last black regiments formed in the Civil War, it drew its numbers from the formerly enslaved populations fleeing plantations in the wake of Sherman's March. One unhappy night, the icy current ripped a tent away from its stakes, leaving exposed a man who would endure the consequences for sixty-five years. As a slave, he had been known as Anderson Odom. Now he was Anderson Freeman. After escaping Jack Odom's plantation at age twenty, Freeman had made the one-hundred-mile journey northward through Georgia from Columbus to Atlanta, where he enlisted in the 138th USCT in July 1865. Following the winter storm, he could not walk for nearly a month. He spent that time in his quarters, treated by the regimental surgeon. He would walk again but would always be left with rheumatism, a broad nineteenth-century term for a range of arthritic symptoms. When Freeman was forty-four, he applied for a pension from the U.S. government, alleging he was "still suffering from the effects" and "cannot perform the labor of an able bodied man caused by my exposure in the service of the U.S. Army." A board of federally deputized physicians measured every part of the former slave's body, concluding rheumatism had disabled him 4/18ths for the performance of manual labor and therefore merited a pension.1 Anderson Freeman was one of hundreds of thousands of freedpeople who came into contact with the federal government in the four decades after the Civil War.2 They did so by actively pursuing military pensions through the U.S. Pension Bureau. In the past two decades, historians have used USCT pension files as an invaluable window into African American experiences of slavery, war, and freedom. Most notably, they have used them to explore social and work relations in slavery; the experiences of soldiers and veterans; and the politics of sex, family, and citizenship.3 This article attempts to situate the pension struggles of former slaves within [End Page 425] the larger project of state building embodied by the U.S. Pension Bureau.4 Indeed, the pension files of former slaves allow us to reconceptualize fundamental assumptions about the federal government and the aftermath of emancipation in America. The post-Reconstruction era is conventionally narrated in terms of exclusion. The federal government, betraying the revolutionary promise of wartime abolition, soon abandoned the cause of freedpeople, essentially leaving them to their own devices in the sharecropping South without meaningful access to or support from the federal state. Widespread disenfranchisement, Black Codes, and the rise of Jim Crow all negated the constitutional rights of African Americans. And so, though not without good reason, even as scholars uncover extraordinary grassroots movements in the rural South, African Americans are still largely painted as outsiders to the state building projects of postwar America. This article challenges the conventional narrative by detailing the extensive interactions that formerly enslaved veterans had with federal officials of the Pension Bureau.5 Freeborn veterans of black state regiments and the USCT, as well as their widows, had always been officially included in the application process for federal pensions. For a decade, however, formerly enslaved veterans of the USCT faced legal prohibition. Yet on March 3, 1873, Congress passed a vitally important act consolidating procedures and increasing pension rates. One provision of that bill stipulated that every pensioner listed as a slave on his regiment's rolls "shall be on the same footing as to bounty and pension as though they had not been slaves at the date of their enlistment."6 On the surface, the Consolidation Act of 1873 was one of great generosity, finally securing the extension of justly earned benefits to the most dispossessed of veterans and widows. In the words of the bill's spokesman in Congress, "if any one class of our soldiers deserve more at our hands than any other, it is that class which...

Worse Than It Looks: The True Burden and Risks of Federal Employee Pension Plans

Federal government employees enjoy pure defined-benefit pensions that promise relatively generous benefits to a large current and former workforce. Being largely unfunded, these plans impose on taxpayers obligations running into the hundreds of billions of dollars. What is worse, misleading accounting understates the true burden and risks these plans create for Canadian taxpayers. This Commentary provides more economically meaningful estimates of the value of federal employee pensions to their participants, and the cost to taxpayers. Its goal is twofold: to alert Canadians to the fiscal burdens and risks created by these plans; and to prompt discussion of reforms that could produce more durable and affordable pensions for federal employees. Official figures on the current cost of these plans and their accumulated obligation use notional interest rates to calculate their value. Because their pension promises are guaranteed by taxpayers and indexed to inflation, the appropriate discount rate is the yield on federal-government real-return bonds (RRBs), which for years has been much lower than the assumed rate in official figures. Correcting this distortion produces a fair-value estimate for Ottawa’s unfunded pension liability of $269.3 billion at the end of 2014/15 ― around $30,000 per family of four, and $117.9 billion higher than the reported number. Because the unfunded pension liability is part of Ottawa’s debt, the fair-value adjustment also raises the net public debt by $117.9 billion: from the $612.3 billion reported at the end 2014/15 to an adjusted $730.2 billion. The authors note that recent changes will raise the share of these plans’ costs that their participants must fund, but object that the reported current costs of these plans ― and therefore the total contribution rates that determine employer and employee shares ― are too low. With RRB yields at recent levels, even the higher employee contributions anticipated by the reforms would leave the taxpayers’ true share far above 50 percent. A fair-value approach to the current service cost can ensure that participants and taxpayers equally share the cost of accruing benefits. The authors further note, however, that even 50:50 sharing of the true current service cost of federal pensions would leave taxpayers exposed. This exposure would apply not only to fluctuations in the annual costs as interest rates, experience, and plan provisions changed but ― far more important ― to fluctuations in the value of previously earned benefits as well. Ottawa could protect taxpayers from this risk by capping employer contributions at a fixed share of pensionable pay. To relieve taxpayers of their current sole responsibility for risks in the federal plan, Ottawa would need to switch to a shared-risk, target-benefit model already common in much of the provincial public sector, which calculates benefits with reference not only to salary and years of service but also to the plans’ funded status.

Distributive politics, the electoral connection, and the antebellum US Congress: The case of military service pensions

We investigate the rise of federal military pensions in the antebellum US Congress to examine whether key aspects of the contemporary electoral connection were present in earlier historical eras. Overall, the political responses of members of Congress to pressures for military service pensions reveal that the quest for credit-claiming opportunities significantly shaped the adoption and evolution of this type of distributive legislation. Analyzing key legislative activity from 1818 to 1832, we find that members’ electoral interests gave rise to a particularistic and often inefficient system of benefits. Specifically, what began as a relatively simple program to provide for disabled Revolutionary War veterans grew into a broader entitlement-style program based on military service that legislators carefully cultivated in order to maximize their prospects for subsequent political advantage. Our analysis thus reveals that crucial features of the electoral connection were indeed present in the antebellum-era Congress, a finding that broadens our collective understanding of the early foundations of American political development.

Equipping Canadians for Success: A Shadow Budget for 2014

The 2014 edition of the C.D. Howe Institute’s annual Shadow Federal Budget reinforces Ottawa’s near-term focus on returning to budgetary surplus, and presents a number of measures to foster growth in living standards over the longer term. Prudent forecasting and greater transparency in budgeting and government spending are two elements of the plan to achieve an early and durable surplus. Spending control is the third – with the dominant thrust being containing the cost of federal employment, and in particular the costs to taxpayers of federal pensions and other postretirement benefits. The Shadow Budget estimates that caps on taxpayers’ contributions to federal-employee pensions, the termination of indefinite banking of unused sick days, and a move to 50-50 cost-sharing of post-retirement health benefits can reduce federal spending by some $5.2 billion in fiscal years 2014/15 and 2015/16 alone. Shadow Budget measures to equip Canadians for success in the longer term fall under three broad headings: the skills of, and opportunities for, Canadian workers; saving and investment; and innovation and entrepreneurship. Measures to promote skills and opportunities include reducing the pressure of the federal government on Canadian labour markets, investing in new job-information and matching, shifting the tax base from income to consumption taxes, phasing out regionally differentiated Employment Insurance, and promoting longer worklife by increasing the age at which Canadians lose access to tax-deferred saving. The Shadow Budget contains several measures to improve the treatment of saving, and savings, in tax-deferred vehicles. It also proposes to promote investment by providing more uniform tax treatment of active foreign-investment income, and a regular rolling review of capital-consumption allowances. As for innovation and entrepreneurship, the Shadow Budget proposes a more favourable tax regime for intellectual property income and making academic excellence the key criterion in supporting basic research. It would reduce ongoing support to many Crown corporations, prepare a slimmed-down Canada Post for a competitive mail market, and create more market discipline for Crown lenders. It would also reduce tariffs, and create a more transparent system for reporting, reviewing and reducing tax expenditures that substitute for formal spending programs. The 2014 Shadow Budget builds on Canada’s relatively good post-crisis performance. It reinforces progress toward surpluses, and so protects Canadians from higher interest rates and reduces the claims of government borrowing on Canadian saving. And it supports economic growth with measures to better deploy Canada’s human capital, promote investment, and stimulate income-boosting innovation. In short, it provides the kind of fiscal leadership Canadians need from their federal government.

William Henry Glasson and the First Hundred Years of Federal Compensation for Service Connected Disability in America

Everyone who has studied the early history of United States federal military pensions knows William Henry Glasson’s Federal Military Pensions in the United States. Published in 1918, it remains the standard work on the subject. But readers with a specific interest in the early history of compensation for service connected disability may find themselves desiring more detail and more continuity than Glasson found room for in a book whose scope is so wide. This paper grew out of my desire to know more about the early legislation that defined America’s way of compensating those who became disabled fighting our wars. It contains summaries of more than 30 resolutions and acts.

Risk, Disability, and Citizenship: U. S. Railroaders and the Federal Employers' Liability Act

This paper examines how a developing work culture shaped by death and disability created a distinct federal policy approach to workplace accidents in the U. S. railroad industry. Railroaders argued that only men willing to bravely confront risks as individuals would succeed in their occupation. As railroading's dangers increased at the end of the nineteenth century, this individualistic approach was replaced by cooperative efforts to campaign for railroad safety. Railroaders, however, were still able to make claims on the government based on their relationship with danger. They argued that since their work was similar to warfare, they should be awarded federal pensions. Although this did not happen, railroaders did successfully claim a privileged citizenship status through the passage of the Federal Employers Liability Act of 1908, which recognized their argument that the dangers with which they grappled and their resulting physical sacrifices made them more than mere wage workers.

Health Security in Canada: Policy Complexity and Overlap

Defining health security as the degree and effectiveness of public policy in providing access to health care as well as income support during times illness and injury, I examine the current state of health security policy in Canada. I deconstruct the relevant health services and income security programmes at both the federal and provincial levels of government, which then allows me to isolate the two most significant policy overlaps: the health benefits overlap between provincial workers' compensation and federal-provincial medicare; and the income replacement overlap between provincial workers' compensation and federal disability pensions.

Aid for Union Soldiers' Families: A Comfortable Entitlement or a Pauper's Pittance? Indiana, 1861–1865

Popular support for dependents of the Civil War soldiers of Tippecanoe County, Indiana, rested on the belief that it was earned by the soldiers’ service. This public provision varied from generous to meager and eventually became an entitlement open to all, regardless of need. Determining factors were patriotism, cost, and recruitment quotas. Although this assistance resembled existing forms of poor relief, it differed in keeping families intact, allowing recipients access to other resources, and basing aid on work (soldiering). Private benevolence made only minor, sporadic contributions, while federal pensions aided very few during the war.

The Political Economy of Public-Private Compensation Differentials: The Case of Federal Pensions

Numerous empirical studies indicate that, as a result of rent-seeking behavior, public-sector workers are overcompensated relative to their private-sector counterparts, with pensions representing part of the difference. I present a history of the Federal Employees Retirement Act of 1920 and show that rent seeking by federal workers cannot explain several features of the act. Instead, I argue that the act represented an optimal incentive contract between Congress and civil service employees in which civil servants accepted mandatory retirement and a compensating wage differential in exchange for the federal pension plan.

On borrowed time: how the growth in entitlement spending threatens America's future

Entitlements represent one of the largest and fastest-growing portions of the federal budget. They are regarded as sacrosanct by lawmakers, yet many people see them as one of the greatest threats to the American Dream. This volume argues that by sacrificing the future in order to pay ever-larger federal benefits through programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and federal pensions, entitlement spending has become a crushing burden to American workers. Peterson and Howe destroy myths surrounding entitlement spending. They show that the bulk of it does not go to the poor. The majority of the elderly are not needy and dependent. Entitlement programs, not defense spending, consume the largest share of the federal budget. In short, we cannot balance the budget without reducing entitlement spending. In a country that demands critical investments--improving public education, alleviating poverty, increasing professional opportunity--growth in entitlement spending is unaffordable.On Borrowed Time is an important and timely book that will be mandatory reading for policymakers, politicians, economists, and a general public concerned with its financial future.

Pensions for Public Employees Present Nationwide Problems

H istorically, pensions for public personnel have been justified largely on personnel policy grounds-to compensate the disabled and to enable retirement of the super-annuated. In the public sector federal disability pensions for veterans began during the Revolutionary War.' Staff retirement system benefits for over-age or unfit Naval officers were enacted in 1855 and were extended to Regular Army officers in 1861 and 1872.2 Retirement of military personnel after 30 years of service was enacted around the turn of this century and some laws authorizing retirement benefits after 20 (or even fewer) years of service were in effect in the World War I era.3

Federal Pensions and Honors for Yellow Fever Work

Federal Pensions and Honors for Yellow Fever Work

Federal Pensions and Honors for Yellow Fever Work

Federal Pensions and Honors for Yellow Fever Work

Federal and Confederate Pensions in the South

Research Article| July 01 1910 Federal and Confederate Pensions in the South William H. Glasson William H. Glasson Professor of Economics in Trinity College. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1910) 9 (3): 280–285. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-9-3-280 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation William H. Glasson; Federal and Confederate Pensions in the South. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 July 1910; 9 (3): 280–285. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-9-3-280 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1910 by Duke University Press1910 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.