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30 or more years? The last Civil War widow died in 2004. She was collecting a pension earned by a soldier who was born in 1846. Now that's a pension.... Oh, and I didn't make this up. BBC NEWS | Americas | Last Civil War widow dies at 97
In my town there is a public servant collecting $500,000 a year in various pensions from the State of Illinois. Meanwhile a great many private sector workers, having paid taxes for a lifetime, are getting Social Security and nothing else.
I remember when there were still something like 16 widows collecting Civil War pensions and a few more collecting Spanish-American War pensions. They were all very young women who had married very old veterans.
The over-arching point is that in some parts of the country there are overly generous pensions for public workers.
It's what is dragging Illinois into the fiscal toilet as we speak.
The main problem is that unlike private companies the government DOESN'T HAVE TO PRE_FUND.
So, if you throw a fat pension to the teachers union for their political support the bill doesn't show up for many decades.
I have several relatives collecting on such pension plans as well as some under private pensions and wow...the IL teachers pension my in-laws are drawing from is "gold plated".
Some have correctly noted that it is part of compensation but some have clearly gone overboard in the past and have since been greatly reduced for younger participants.
P.S. Many cities have also had to change rules like getting paid based upon your highest year because they'd have guys working all the over-time, holidays etc. their last year on the police force etc. and ending up getting more $$$ in retirement than they were making normally.
A typical retiree now can easily collect for 30 or more years. I know teachers who retired with $90k a year in a pension and will get COL increases to boot. In a typical lifespan they will get a minimum of $2 million or more (plus being able to stay on their medical plan until Medicare kicks in but that's another topic). With the booms and busts of the stock market how many people working a typical job could ever see that type of retirement?
First, do you know why they collect for 30 or more years?
It's probably because they have to work for 30 or more years to establish the required combination of both years of service and the minimum age to be eligible to retire.
I guess you don't want to pay people what they have earned, huh?
Second, as other posters have stated, "teachers" retiring with $90,000 yearly pension are more than likely administrators but if they are teachers then more likely than not, they also have advanced degrees or multiple degrees to justify their higher pay and pensions.
I will never understand those of you who never want to pay an individual what they are worth.
Perhaps, you would prefer that we hire high school dropouts as teachers, so we could pay them minimum wage with no benefits and really save some money, huh?
In my town there is a public servant collecting $500,000 a year in various pensions from the State of Illinois. Meanwhile a great many private sector workers, having paid taxes for a lifetime, are getting Social Security and nothing else.
and the pension is taxed too while the person with the stock investment pays lower taxes...
people can control their taxes by how they invest, most pension plans are taxed as income, talk about a lifetime of paying taxes
First, do you know why they collect for 30 or more years?
It's probably because they have to work for 30 or more years to establish the required combination of both years of service and the minimum age to be eligible to retire.
I guess you don't want to pay people what they have earned, huh?
Second, as other posters have stated, "teachers" retiring with $90,000 yearly pension are more than likely administrators but if they are teachers then more likely than not, they also have advanced degrees or multiple degrees to justify their higher pay and pensions.
I will never understand those of you who never want to pay an individual what they are worth.
Perhaps, you would prefer that we hire high school dropouts as teachers, so we could pay them minimum wage with no benefits and really save some money, huh?
That's not a bad idea. As long as taxpayers are paying for public lazy bums, why not pay them minimum wages?
If the current public lazy bums are paid according to how well our students rank in the world, minimum wage is what they would get.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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Quote:
Originally Posted by phlinak
First, do you know why they collect for 30 or more years?
It's probably because they have to work for 30 or more years to establish the required combination of both years of service and the minimum age to be eligible to retire.
I guess you don't want to pay people what they have earned, huh?
Second, as other posters have stated, "teachers" retiring with $90,000 yearly pension are more than likely administrators but if they are teachers then more likely than not, they also have advanced degrees or multiple degrees to justify their higher pay and pensions.
I will never understand those of you who never want to pay an individual what they are worth.
Perhaps, you would prefer that we hire high school dropouts as teachers, so we could pay them minimum wage with no benefits and really save some money, huh?
A person can easily retire at age 55 with 30 years in if they started at 25. I doubt that you will see much of that after the current retiree generation has stopped working, because people don't stay that long at one employer any more. Not everyone lives 30 years after retiring, in fact here most are staying to 70-72, and not statistically likely to live to 90-92. One woman I used to work with years ago lost her husband and loved her job so kept going to age 86. When she finally retired last year she had a nice public pension (in CA) with 61 years there. Unfortunately, she died two months later.
I am just reading California's generous pensions system for Teachers. When people in the private sector struggle so much and have zero security in retirement why is this type of golden parachute offered to government employees in a time when pension funds are self destructing? Now, my guess is that they will raise taxes which people in the private sector will pay so that these government employees can continue to get their golden parachutes.
Heck, the CA teachers pension is even inflation protected... private people are struggling with keeping up with inflation with ultra low interest rates on their savings and an unstable stock market going forward yet all these protections are free to government employees in retirement.
It's a bit too late for me but probably I should've got a government job 10 years ago, salaries in the private sector have declined and now the private sector does not pay much more than the government sector.
They pay into it from their salary for years, they earn it. And in many states, they are ineligible for social security because of this pension. Rather than trying to knock down someone else, how about promoting better pension systems for everyone - defined benefit systems vs. defined contribution that many employers want to get away with. How about promoting a stronger labor movement that would improve your own pension and benefits?
That's not a bad idea. As long as taxpayers are paying for public lazy bums, why not pay them minimum wages?
If the current public lazy bums are paid according to how well our students rank in the world, minimum wage is what they would get.
That’s right. Let’s give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and planning — that equals 6-1/2 hours).
So each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now how many students do they teach in a day…maybe 30? So that’s $19.50 x 30 = $585 a day.
However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.
LET’S SEE….
That’s $585 X 180= $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).
What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master’s degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6-1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.
Wait a minute — there’s something wrong here! There sure is!
The average teacher’s salary (nationwide) is $50,000.
$50,000/180 days = $277.77 per day / 30 students = $9.25 / 6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student — a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!)
A person can easily retire at age 55 with 30 years in if they started at 25. I doubt that you will see much of that after the current retiree generation has stopped working, because people don't stay that long at one employer any more. Not everyone lives 30 years after retiring, in fact here most are staying to 70-72, and not statistically likely to live to 90-92. One woman I used to work with years ago lost her husband and loved her job so kept going to age 86. When she finally retired last year she had a nice public pension (in CA) with 61 years there. Unfortunately, she died two months later.
And in truth, except for some very specific occupations (law enforcement, fire fighter, military being the most common) relatively few people retired at 55 in any event.
I had very few teaching colleagues (literally less than ten over my 30+ year career, maybe only five or six now that I think about it) who retired in their 50s.
Of those all but two left our very dysfunctional school system with their thirty years and went to a system closer to where they lived and taught for another ten or fifteen years. Before anyone screams "double dipping" it takes teachers ten years in Maryland to get vested for a pension (everyone else in the State Retirement System vests at five years).
Of the two who really "retired" one did so because her husband was retiring from the military while the other went into another career.
Well said ! people can be jealous all they want of public employee pensions. I earned mine working 29 yrs in the NY State Dept of Corrections. Took a test that everyone in NY over 18 was eligible to take when I was 21, scored high enough to be hired and worked inside prisons with NY Sates felons . The pension rules and benefits were in place when I started ( I didn't make them ) and I did what was required to earn my pension and retired at 51. I'm happily collecting the pension I earned . If you wanted this pension or any other public employee pension you should have taken one of the many jobs and worked at them the required years to earn that pension. The only person responsible that you don't have a public employee pension is you .
QUOTE=phlinak;51893853]Hmm.
Were you feeling this way when the stock market was booming and the interest rates were high?
The answer is probably no.
I remember back in the 1990s and the mid 2000s when the stock market was just going up, up, up and all of the people who were laughing at public sector employees who were "working for peanuts and missing out on making real money".
Now they're weeping and gnashing their teeth and bellyaching about how public sector employees have it too good.
Yeah, they can bite me.[/quote]
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