The PERS systems are adapting to greater longevity. As actuaries learn that people will live longer in the future, they are getting systems to dial back their pensions. In Washington State, the most expensive started working before 1972, and some state employees are now offered only a 401K. That said, there is also a challenge that when the market booms, "surpluses" are drawn out. When the market crashes, it's hard to make up for the missing investment.
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
#12Without 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.
If you click around on the author's publications, a theme is government pensions and government spending in general.
Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#13Pensions 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.
It should be noted that Illinois’ republican govenor ran on pension reform, then to everyone’s shagrin, attempted to break unions. He made no headway on either issue, and is now running against a billionaire Democratic challenger who is expected to win.
Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#14[deleted]
Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#15Well, 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.
At the very least, someone should crunch the numbers and find out. It's anyone's guess how the ratios will skew until you measure them.
How to approach this fairly is a whole other can of worms; there will almost inevitably be some unjust outcomes.
Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#16What 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…
I'm not sure why this is so heavily down-voted. Pensions are surely a problem, but they are clearly a drop in the bucket compared to the revenue that states miss out on when they let corporations pit them against each other in race to the bottom behavior.
Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#17[deleted]
Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#18My 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…
Borrowing from the future is not a good strategy.
Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#19Pensions 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.
It should be noted that Illinois’ republican govenor ran on pension reform, then to everyone’s shagrin, attempted to break unions. He made no headway on either issue, and is now running against a billionaire Democratic challenger who is expected to win.
The only way to reform pensions is to deal with the unions. The Wisconsin model works.
Re: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash
#20Without 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…
The way most pensions work, you collect a percentage of your 3-5 highest salaries ever, assuming you've been there long enough.
A good reason department heads in education shuffle every three years