Given how much of the fourth season of Sons of Anarchy was about the financial vulnerabilities of, in particular, Clay and Jax, I started thinking a lot about how SAMCRO could function more effectively as an organization. Could the club start a fake pension fund as a way to explain the accumulation of its illict profits as legitimate proceeds of the auto body shop? Could it pay for the education of the club’s mechanics so they could get certification that would make them employable elsewhere? There are upsides and downsides to any potential solutions in terms of how much attention from law enforcement.

But in the end, I realized, the club will never give members the tools that would make it easier to leave. The Sons of Anarchy are a lot like the Republican Party: the MC is increasingly a vehicle for angry, white people to see their grievances legitimated even as it provides them with very little in the way of tangible benefit.

So much of the tension in season four is driven by the fact that, despite the large profits the club sometimes turns on deals, their members live rather financially precarious lives. Clay is drawn to the deal with the cartel even though it involves moving drugs, something that’s absolutely beyond what the club previously defined as the pale, in part because he sees the end of his ability to ride and work with his hands and doesn’t have a nest egg. Jax mires himself in Charming because, as he explains to Tara, he’s an only-decent mechanics with few other prospects for an honest, steady job outside the club, but he can’t accomodate himself to the prospect of living mainly on his wife’s income. As a viewer, it’s hugely frustrating to see Jax insist on an arrangement that places his children and his fiancee in continual danger for the sake of his pride, and that really seems to act as a bridge to a plot arc that renders Tara unable to support him, to provide a financial incentive for them to leave town. But I understand Jax’s desire to be able to support his family even as I’m angry at his insistence in boxing himself in to a dreadful situation.

The thing is, the club provides other things for Jax and Clay, and not all of them are jobs or collections of letters on philosophies of anarchist governance. It’s given both men positions of authority not just within the club, but in Charming itself—being part of SAMCRO gives them standing that without money or formal education, they’d be unlikely to achieve by other means. It gives them a sense of identity that’s written directly into their skin and can be used to negotiate their relationships with other people and other groups. And it gives them justification to pursue their grievances without restraint: if someone offends them, they’re free to pluck that person out. Those cognitive tools for identifying themselves and justifying even their worst behavior are powerful enough that even though the club is actively detrimental to their long-term financial security, their relationships to their families, and even their safety, people like Opie, Clay, and Jax are willing to stick with it. That loyalty is a testament as much to the poverty of opportunities for them elsewhere as it is to the power of the club.

Then, there’s the position of people color within the MC. I should say up front that I thought the show’s treatment of Juice Ortiz—the idea that he’d be exiled from the club or even killed because his father was black—in season four was ludicrously contrived. It’s bizarre, given the long-running conflicts between SAMCRO and the Nords, that the exclusion of black men from SAMCRO membership wouldn’t have come up or been used as an argument to expose their hypocrisy at any point. And Sons of Anarchy reminded me of Glee in the way it handled Juice’s botched suicide attempt and Chibs revelation that Juice had never been in danger from the club: the show wanted credit for having gone there, without actually having to grapple with the implications of playing out the story line it had set up. But it did raise some interesting questions about criteria for membership, and what organizations like SAMCRO—or the Republican Party—have to offer people who may be the active targets of some of their worst impulses. I’m not saying that no black people should ever be Republicans—that’s ludicrous and reductive. But it’s a fascinating example of how people weigh their perceived individual and collective needs when they’re picking the engines of their identity creation. And Otto is an example of what happens when the actual costs someone suffers from allegiance to an organization in real life begins to outweigh the sense of identity and cultural support they gain from that affiliation.

It’s not always clear to me whether Sons of Anarchy is an inherently conservative or liberal show, or neither. It spends a lot of time exploring institutions and norms it later illustrates the cost of, whether it’s loyalty to SAMCRO or the huge vulnerabilities of being an Old Lady. But at the end of the fourth season SAMCRO’s become an engine of its own reproduction, rather than a productive contributor to Charming or its members lives. Whether Jax—or anyone—can save it is an open, and vital, question.

Perry officially retired in January so he could start collecting his lucrative pension benefits early, but he still gets to collect his salary — and has in turn dramatically boosted his take-home pay.

Perry makes a $150,000 annual gross salary as Texas govenor. Now, thanks to his early retirement, Perry, 61, gets a monthly retirement annuity of $7,698 before taxes, or $6,588 net. That raises his gross annual salary to more than $240,000.

The GOP candidate who demanded sweeping changes to the “Ponzi scheme” that is Social Security and slammed public workers for their special “perks” is also eligible for Social Security and “lifetime, state-provided health care.” Perry’s windfall is “consistent with Texas state law and Employee Retirement System rules,” said Perry’s spokesman Ray Sullivan. The Texas Tribune’s Jay Root discovered this “early retirement manuever” via new ethics disclosures from the Federal Election Commission which requires candidates to detail exactly how they make their money.

During an appearance on C-Span earlier this week, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) continued this line of attack on public worker pensions. Yet at one point, the C-Span host pointed to a Washington Post article that rightly noted that Congress’s own pension plans are “hefty” and allow lawmakers to “retire with generous benefits packages.” When the host asked King what he thought about that, the congressman laughed off the question and said that his own pension is “slim pickins”:

HOST: Here’s a story in today’s Washington post, coming to us from the McClatchy Tribune Services, with pension plans under attack, congress’s own benefits are hefty, lawmakers can retire with generous packages with less buy-in.

KING: The response for that I guess is what you’re wondering. Um, you know, the packages we have today are not the packages that many people think we have. I believe it’s five years to be vested in a retirement plan at all. The federal employees who make a career out of this their plan is one that accumulates over their working career of their lifetime, the average time here in congress as I recall I have to go back to check this, is about 10.8 years. [...] The pension plan for the average member of Congress is not that great […] If I were going to retire off of what’s here, it would be a pretty slim pickins.

Watch it:

King’s defense of congressional pension plans as inferior to other public employee pension plans leaves out important facts about how generous congressional pension plans really are. While it’s true that members of Congress may not serve as many years in the government as some public workers, it’s also true that their pensions are in many ways actually far more cushy than those of the public workers they are attacking.

For example, lawmakers only contribute “1.3 percent of their salaries” into their defined benefit plan, while “the midpoint for defined-benefit pension contributions from state workers” is actually almost 4 times higher, at 5 percent. Additionally, the “accrual rate, a calculation used to determine the rate at which a beneficiary accrues full retirement benefits, is much more generous for federal lawmakers than for most Americans.” Federal employees “have an accrual rate of 1 percent for their pensions. However, members of Congress have an accrual rate of 1.7 percent.”

King’s attack on the pensions of public employees while defending his own congressional pension plan and downplaying its generosity is reminiscent of the many conservative lawmakers — including King — who are against government-subsidized health insurance for Americans but choose to keep their own federally subsidized plan. Both cases are stark reminders of conservative hypocrisy.

Dylan Matthews’ post on the evidence that rich people don’t flee high-tax states is interesting. One wonders how much of this relates to the regionalized nature of American political culture. If you like living in Connecticut, you’re presumably not going to just go move to Alabama to save on your taxes. But if you like living in Connecticut you might also enjoy New Jersey. Except New Jersey’s also a high tax state. And so’s New York.

Conversely, Alabama might hope to attract migrants with lots of human capital from Mississippi with its low tax rates, but this is hard to pull off since Mississippi also has low tax rates. If you look at a state pair with a steeper policy gradient, you might see bigger effects. The shape of the Boston-Quincy MSA seems to me to support the thesis the idea (which you certainly here anecdotally) that some people choose to live in Greater Boston’s New Hampshire fringe rather than other geographically closer locales in Massachusetts for tax reasons.

Bonus fact: Most Americans would faint instantly upon hearing about Swedish levels of taxation, but when I was in Copenhagen I was told that one reason many people choose to commute across the Øresund Bridge is to avoid the even-higher Danish taxes. One suspects that if Sweden adopted Canada’s tax code, that Denmark’s current policy might become non-viable.

But of course as I said yesterday one of the key issues here is what your jurisdiction looks like on the spend side. If your higher taxes are paying for better infrastructure and superior services, then it seems to me you’re in great shape. But a problem many U.S. states will increasingly be facing is that their higher taxes will be going to pay pension and health care benefits for retired civil servants, thanks to decades of earlier fuzzy math in terms of funding these plans.

Rebuild retirement wealth

• Federal 401(k) match. Provide federal matching funds to 401(k) and IRA contributions, up to $1,000 per worker per year.

• Temporary tax exemption for 401(k) withdrawals. Provide a temporary exemption from federal income taxes for the first $15,000 in 401(k) withdrawals for seniors who are withdrawing from their accounts.
• Streamlined consolidation of 401(k) accounts. Nearly half of all workers who switch jobs cash out their 401(k)s. Create a streamlined, automatic roll-over process for workers with multiple 401(k) accounts or who are switching jobs to avoid the problem of “cash out.”
• Federal 401(k) contribution insurance. For most workers today, a 401(k) account is the centerpiece of their retirement security and savings. Yet
  workers approaching retirement are unprotected from having their investments decimated by market shocks. Create an entity modeled after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that would protect the principal contributed to workers’ 401(k) accounts until a worker retires.

The consolidations thing seems like a fine idea, although “create a streamlined, automatic roll-over process” is more of a placeholder than an actual policy. And I’m not sure I fully understand the 401(k) insurance proposal — how could it be modeled on the FDIC? 401(k)s don’t, as far as I’m aware, suffer from “runs” in the same way that bank deposits do. And a guarantee of this sort seems like it could create a substantial moral hazard problem in a way that’s not really true of bank deposits. It’s conceivable that this is a good idea, though, but you’d want to know more details — details that don’t seem to be available.

Federal matching funds for 401(k) and IRA contributions seems like a pretty ill-considered idea. In the short run, if this succeeded in boosting short-term savings rates it would have a contractionary impact on the economy and make things worse. In the long run, the idea of federal matches to boost savings has some merit, but this is an odd way of implementing it. In particular, it would be pretty regressive — an additional subsidy for families already sufficiently well-off to be saving money that does nothing for the economically struggling. CAP has, by contrast, proposed a Universal 401(k) approach that seeks to target aid to the neediest (for whom Third Way would do nothing) while not extending additional help to the wealthiest Americans.

Despite those risks (again, for which workers don’t receive higher expected returns on their investments, on average), a significant number of 401(k) participants hold the bulk of their assets in company stock. According to calculations by the Employee Benefits Research Institute, 47 percent of 401(k) participants were enrolled in plans that offered company stock as an option as of the end of 2006. Of those participants, 7.3 percent held more than 90 percent of their assets in company stock, and over 15 percent held over half their assets in company stock. (See page 33 of EBRI Issue Brief 308, “401(k) Asset Allocation, Account Balances, and Loan Activity in 2006.”) At yesterday’s hearing, I didn’t make clear that the 7.3 percent figure applied only to those who were in plans offering company stock. So the overall share of 401(k) participants with 90 percent or more of their assets invested in company stock is more like .47*7.3=3.4 percent. It’s still too high.

And to be clear, 3.4 percent is too high because the correct proportion of 401(k) participants with 90 percent or more of their assets invested in company stock is zero. Nobody with any choice in the matter should be nearly that heavily invested in any one company. And under normal circumstances, it’s especially pernicious to be heavily invested in the company you work for. That means that if your stock goes bust, it’s probably a situation where you’re likely to lose your job as well.

The only places I’ve ever worked for have been either privately held firms (The Atlantic) or non-profits (TAP, CAP) so I haven’t personally experienced this problem, but I’m told that at a lot of firms there’s substantial informal and semi-formal social pressure to be heavily invested in the employing firm. Maybe not so many people go as far as 90 percent, but 90 percent is absurdly too high anyway. You’d do a lot of good for a lot of people if you found a way to break that habit.