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A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash

nytimes.com

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Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash

#111

Post by [deleted] »

cma wrote: post #81
mythrwy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4 million people. How many working people with enough income to pay tax? Half? Less? So maybe ~13K per tax paying person in outstanding pension obligations alone? That is a big deal.

> So maybe ~13K per tax paying person in outstanding pension obligations alone? Then that would be an obligation of about $300 per tax paying worker per year over their working lifetime. The average yearly salary in Oregon is $50,000. The article makes it out through anecdote that this is why they didn't have gas to send trucks out for a road repair. In the last 20 years Oregon has had near 1% per year population gro…

[deleted]

Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash

#112

Post by skookumchuck »

"So, when lawmakers required government retirees to pay Oregon’s 9 percent income tax, as everybody else did, they also increased pensions by 9.89 percent, giving retirees extra money to pay the tax with."

Government workers are certainly in a special privileged class.

Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash

#113

Post by dominotw »

ubernostrum wrote: post #78
dominotw wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assertion makes sense if quality of candidates drops when pension is removed. We don't know exactly why ppl are choosing govt jobs. My wife choose it because it offers 9-5, no overtime.

If your wife was a sole earner without a spouse's income to supplement her household, would she be as willing to accept low wages now in exchange for a high pension later? Or would she look for a job that pays enough to cover her cost of living today, since that's a prerequisite to reaching the pension age?

yes ofcourse I was merely suggesting that there are other reasons why ppl choose govt jobs and the quality of candidates might not drop if we removed pension.

Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash

#114

Post by skookumchuck »

bartart wrote: post #10
dasil003 wrote: post #4

Without actually showing some statistics on the pension payments and how the overall budget breaks down, I can't help but feel manipulated. Yes it's easy to paint an ugly picture of the privileged outliers, but I suspect the correlation between school and infrastructure cuts and money going straight into rich pensioners pockets is not quite as cut and dried as NYT would have us believe.

In California "More than 200,000 civil servants became eligible to retire at 55 — and in many cases collect more than half their highest salary for life. California Highway Patrol officers could retire at 50 and receive as much as 90% of their peak pay for as long as they lived." http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-pension-crisis-davis-d... This seems like a pretty big budget item, especially since most CA governme…

I don't get this entitlement to retire at 55 or even 50. The retirement age should be 65.

Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash

#115

Post by acchow »

rootusrootus wrote: post #3

My mom is a PERS retiree. Not one of the rich ones, though she did retire at the perfect moment and she has a livable retirement income. One thing a lot of people (who do not work in gov't) don't recall is that while the economy was roaring back then, Oregonians working for the gov't went for years without so much as a cost of living adjustment. Some of the perks they got from PERS were in lieu of getting a raise. So…

To compensate for the lower pay, aren't government jobs much lower stress? And have good job security? Hard to get fired even if you do very little?

Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash

#116

Post by pfarnsworth »

Defined benefits plans, ie pensions, should be outlawed, as long as they have any component that must be paid by taxpayers. For the most part, pensions are Ponzi schemes and require more and more employees to enter the system to pay for those on the pension. If you're talking about a private pension system that can collapse, then that's okay, but if it's a government pension that can keep taxing people because their benefits are too lucrative, those should definitely be outlawed, especially the ones for Congress.

Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash

#117

Post by lotsofpulp »

Spooky23 wrote: post #51
rayiner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part, government work does not pay poorly.[1] For example federal employees without advanced degrees earn a lot more in government than in the private sector: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/... [1] I’m willing to entertain the idea our economic system as a whole undercompensates secretaries and overcompensates executives. That’s a different issue.

The federal government isn’t state and local. Also note that the Feds no longer have generous pension plans and rely on 457 plans similar to 401k. Someone in my family ran a fire department in the 80s and 90s. They had no money and in this state arbitration made negotiations difficult for management to win. So they gave away pension and health concessions that were cheap then. The number one issue with these systems…

The pension and health concessions were never cheap to give away. Someone just had the brilliant idea that since voters aren't able to spend time analyzing and verifying the numbers, and there are no laws regarding how to calculate them, that you can just understate the costs and let the future deal with it.

Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash

#118

Post by tedsanders »

sgc wrote: post #62
tedsanders wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fascinating digression. I conceptualize borrowing oppositely. When you borrow, you borrow from someone else's past/present labor and obligate your future labor. (Where 'you' can be an individual, organization, or society.) In my view, borrowing is always from the past. You cannot borrow that which has not yet been created.

Actually most of the money that is borrowed (approx 90% AFAIK) is invented and injected into the economy. You borrow against the future because this new creation of currency must later be paid by labor or investments.

In my conceptualization, money is not the thing that is borrowed. Money is just the measuring stick. What's actually borrowed is the stuff bought with the money. And that stuff is made in the past or present, not the future.

For example, imagine I take a loan to buy a house. The people who built the house invested their labor with the expectation of future payment. Or if they spent their wages, then the firm that fronted their wages invested labor into building the firm with the expectation of future payment.

Generally, if one borrows, someone else must loan. This means that if you are consuming before producing, then at some point in the economic chain, there is someone who has produced but not yet consumed.

It is in this sense that I conceptualize borrowing as coming from the past.

This notion is reflected in the GDP equation of a closed economy: GDP = C + I. Any consumption over production must be balanced by investment, which is itself past production.

Of course, if we are to conceptualize literally, then borrowers do not borrow from either the future or the past. They borrow from banks.

Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash

#119

Post by tptacek »

ubernostrum wrote: post #71
rayiner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part, government work does not pay poorly.[1] For example federal employees without advanced degrees earn a lot more in government than in the private sector: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/... [1] I’m willing to entertain the idea our economic system as a whole undercompensates secretaries and overcompensates executives. That’s a different issue.

Mentioning federal employees in a discussion of state/local employees is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Please provide sources to counter the assertion that state/local employees often get large pensions in lieu of salary.

The median annual cash compensation for a teacher in my kid's public high school district in Illinois is six figures.

I know that's not true of teachers in other states; Oklahoma teachers look like they're getting shafted.

But in Illinois, where we have a public pension crisis, I don't have trouble coming up with evidence that public sector employees did not make cash comp sacrifices for their defined-benefit pensions.

Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash

#120

Post by jadedhacker »

Eridrus wrote: post #26
rootusrootus wrote: post #3

My mom is a PERS retiree. Not one of the rich ones, though she did retire at the perfect moment and she has a livable retirement income. One thing a lot of people (who do not work in gov't) don't recall is that while the economy was roaring back then, Oregonians working for the gov't went for years without so much as a cost of living adjustment. Some of the perks they got from PERS were in lieu of getting a raise. So…

Yes, this is an absolutely backwards way to pay people. When times are tough we end up tightening our belts on a whole host of services, but cannot adjust pensions because we have promised them. We should just pay people market rates and avoid saddling ourselves with a bunch of debt when times are good.

When is the government ever not tightening its belt? It's ridiculous that we can pay for bombs but not pensions. Just tax the rich some more. The debt never matters when it comes to killing but always matters when it comes to salving.
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