A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
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Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#2I guess I'm one of those .04%.
Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#3My 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 while I think PERS made some stupid decisions, let's not all heap blame on the workers and demand they suffer now. Gov't work pays crap and part of the benefit is supposed to be a little more long-term security.
Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#4Without 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.
Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#5Well, cutting the top out of this seems like the obvious solution. Pants-on-head to give an Oregon coach who's been funded by Nike to collect a multimillion pension.
Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#6What a pathetic ploy to divide the working class against each other. The reason states are short on cash is the race to the bottom we’ve all been participating in since the 1980s when government policy and general economic policy moved from focusing on keeping the middle class healthy to massive tax breaks and cuts for corporations and the wealthy.
For the last nearly 40 years every state has been playing the game of trying to attract corporations with massive tax breaks against the promise of jobs. Then a lot of the time the promised jobs never appear. Meanwhile the state is still out millions or billions of dollars in revenue.
Corporations and the wealthy can afford to hire lobbyists to write favorable policies. Working class people cannot and have been eating the brunt of all the tax breaks the rich and powerful and connected have received.
Maybe a handful of people in some states have abnormally high pensions. That’s not the source of the problem. Those pensions were solvent until they were treated like a piggy bank by corrupt and bought politicians.
Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#7Well, cutting the top out of this seems like the obvious solution. Pants-on-head to give an Oregon coach who's been funded by Nike to collect a multimillion pension.
It does seem reasonable that there would be a cap, but I wonder how much cutting the pensions of a few thousand highly paid retirees will impact the budget.
Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#8Pensions are going to become a hot political issue as they become more and more unsustainable. Even Illinois, one of the most liberal states in the US, elected a republican governor four years ago in large part because he promised to tackle the state's pension crisis.
Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#9My 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…
This is absolutely true. I have several members of my family who work in the gov, and I have witnessed years of inadequate inflation raises - nothing else. The "trade" was a nicer retirement and better health benefits.
Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#10Without 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 government pension funds haven't achieved their expected 7.5% return consistently for years if not decades. Eventually the money to pay for these large pensions comes from money that would have been spent on other things.