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Retirement Security

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Full-Text Articles in Retirement Security Law

Definitions, Religion, And Free Exercise Guarantees, Mark Strasser Jan 2015

Definitions, Religion, And Free Exercise Guarantees, Mark Strasser

Mark Strasser

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the free exercise of religion. Non-religious practices do not receive those same protections, which makes the ability to distinguish between religious and non-religious practices important. Regrettably, members of the Court have been unable to agree about how to distinguish the religious from the non-religious—sometimes, the implicit criteria focus on the sincerity of the beliefs, sometimes the strength of the beliefs or the role that they play in an individual’s life, and sometimes the kind of beliefs. In short, the Court has virtually guaranteed an incoherent jurisprudence by sending contradictory signals with …


Leverage, Linkage, And Leakage: Problems With The Private Pension System And How They Should Inform The Social Security Reform Debate, Norman P. Stein, Patricia E. Dilley Jun 2013

Leverage, Linkage, And Leakage: Problems With The Private Pension System And How They Should Inform The Social Security Reform Debate, Norman P. Stein, Patricia E. Dilley

Patricia E Dilley

The argument for Social Security privatization is, at bottom, simple: we need more, and better, advance funding of the public retirement system. In particular, we need to commit a portion of FICA tax to privately managed investment accounts, which will purchase investment instruments that promise higher rates of return than the government debt instruments in which the Social Security surplus is currently invested. The privatization debate has centered on the extent to which Social Security faces an impending demographic crisis during the coming decades, whether privatization is fundamentally inconsistent with the idea of social insurance, whether privatization financial projections are …