The government's Railroad Retirement program is a clear anomaly in the U.S. economic landscape. The program taxes employers and workers in a specific private-sector industry to provide pensions to workers in that industry. Like Social Security, Railroad Retirement had been funded on a...

The experience of the reformed Railroad Retirement program has lessons for initiatives that would invest Social Security assets in equities: * To address the risk in equity investment, Congress would likely require an automatic adjustment mechanism to keep the program “on track.” * The...