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Garden State Ranks 95th in Pension Generosity Out of 100 Top Plans Nationally
"While one of the central tenets of repeated calls for major changes to New Jersey’s public
pension system is the claim that public employee pensions are overly generous, retirement
benefits for the state’s public workers are already among the least generous of all large public sector pensions in the country, in part because of cuts enacted in the pension reforms of 2011."
"New Jersey’s real pension problem is lack of employer contributions, not overly generous
retirement benefits.
The source of New Jersey’s unfunded pension liabilities is the state’s persistent failure to make
annual required contribution payments. New Jersey ranks last among the 50 states – by a large
margin – for the share of required pension contributions actually made since the early 2000s.4
Gov. Christie exacerbated New Jersey’s worst-in-the-nation ranking in the last budget when he
line-item vetoed $900 million in pension contributions and announced plans to short pensions by
nearly $2.5 billion in the 2014 and 2015 budgets combined. This veto was unnecessary as well as
imprudent because the Legislature had found a way to raise the needed revenue without
burdening New Jersey’s middle class."
NMC- since 1995 the taxes that went towards teachers pensions were about 1/3 of 1% of the budgets for the State and Local Boards of education. That is about an average of $200 million dollars a year. You can see the numbers for yourself by reading the report issued by the Governor's Commission on the Pension.
I would like to know your definiiton of what drives an expense if you think 1/3 of 1% is creating the burden of property taxes.
The average teacher has a college degree plus additional college credits, has been teaching 15 years and makes about $65,000. That teacher contributes 7% of their salary to the retirement plan and pays about 25- 30% of the cost of their health care plan.
Here is the pension math- the employer is to contribute 4%, a teacher is to contribute 7% and the pension fund investments have returned 8.7% over 30 years. Taking that math yes the average teacher pension of # of years over 55 times the last 3 years of service is funded. The average retiree in the teachers pension retires at 61 and lives currently to 83. Those are the numbers the pension is based on.
The pension has earned 8.7% as the average ROI over the past 30 years
And of course that is one of the key variables. Also inflation rate, wage growth and all the other acturial calculations that go into managing a pension. What cannot be questioned is that if one side of the funding equation is missed for an extended period of time the system will be in trouble.
For example in your question above a teacher could receive a pension starting at $40,000 a year with a 3% inflation COLA for 22 years if they started with about $520,000 in an IRA if they averaged 8% over those 22 years. Remember the account is zero at the end of the 22 years.
One benefit of a pension is that you are protected from the worry of asset protection or ever running out of money because pensions pool the risk among a large group. Some of those will live longer than average and some die sooner but the pool will have an average period of time that they need the funds.
Dont have time to read the entire thread but lets just say NJ taxes are high for a few reasons.
Most people have very little blame in terms of high taxes. That also includes teachers and regular public employees.
NJ is soo corrupt and the insane levels of government allows those that are well connected to wreck the entire state and put the "regular" people on the hook or shoulder the blame. No show jobs,duplicitous positions with nothing to do all hurt most of us. Then we start to nit pick each other do death and blame each other as if a teacher making 65k is ruining the states finances. Yet a county sheriff who does god knows what is making 200k plus. Dems and Rep are equally guilty and the actual problem. Of course that will never happen because its easier to blame each other.
Dont have time to read the entire thread but lets just say NJ taxes are high for a few reasons.
Most people have very little blame in terms of high taxes. That also includes teachers and regular public employees.
NJ is soo corrupt and the insane levels of government allows those that are well connected to wreck the entire state and put the "regular" people on the hook or shoulder the blame. No show jobs,duplicitous positions with nothing to do all hurt most of us. Then we start to nit pick each other do death and blame each other as if a teacher making 65k is ruining the states finances. Yet a county sheriff who does god knows what is making 200k plus. Dems and Rep are equally guilty and the actual problem. Of course that will never happen because its easier to blame each other.
You make a good point. Remember the Mt. Laurel decision which pumped BILLONS into inner city schools. When Corzine took office, they had run out of money and needed more to complete the projects, but could not account for the 8 BILLON that was already spent. Corzine just gave them more, and we never heard what happened to the original 8 BILLION that disappeared.
Property taxes will rise again as the state implements the new COAH regulations. This will force towns to build and subsidize low and moderate income housing. Unlike other states that force builders to build these units as part of a development, the state is putting the burden on each town by assigning them a specific number of units. The property tax payers get to pay for the bonds that have to be issued to cover the initial building of the units. And, since the rent is set based upon a person's income, if the operating expenses fall short of the rent collected, guess who gets to pay the difference- the property tax payers.
Amen!
Although this little anecdote goes back a few decades, I don't believe that things are any different today:
A very well-connected acquaintance had a no-show job with the City of Bayonne, and it was almost as if the local powers-that-be wanted to make this invented job as ludicrous as possible. This guy--who was morbidly obese--was on the city's payrolls as a "Tree Climber" with the city's Forestry Department.
Yes, Bayonne had (and possibly still has) a Forestry Department--in a city that was noteworthy for having...very few trees. And, this guy was barely able to climb in and out of a car without assistance, yet he was listed as a "Tree Climber". You really can't make-up stuff like that.
In addition to the Sheriff's Department, Hudson County used to have a county police force, a separate county park police force, and yet another separate county Boulevard police force just for Hudson County Boulevard, which is now known as JFK Boulevard. Naturally, each force had its own chief, its own deputy chief, a captain or two, and the rest of the usual hierarchy. Each of those separate forces had a different color scheme for their cars.
The aforementioned boulevard had its own board of supervisors--The Hudson County Boulevard Commissioners--and each one was given a new Imperial sedan every couple of years, with the added privilege of filling the tank at the county pumps. What made this special board of supervisors especially ludicrous was the fact that "The Boulevard" was the most badly-deteriorated road in the entire county, and looked--literally--like a warzone after it had been carpet-bombed. The inside joke was that the commissioners were given Imperials because they were the only cars that could travel that road on a steady basis without being shaken to pieces.
And, then there was the Hudson County Mosquito Commission. Each summer, they hired very large numbers of people to spray the swamps, but the reality is that over half of the jobs were no-show jobs. And, needless to say the full-time county Mosquito Commissioner was given a very large salary.
Later in my life, I spent most of my working years in Woodbridge, where they were even more corrupt than the pols were in Bayonne and the rest of Hudson County. As one of my supervisors in Woodbridge used to say--jokingly, "The crooks in this town don't even know how to make things look legitimate. When I lived in Jersey City, at least the politicians were very professional when it came to corruption".
Last edited by Retriever; 02-14-2015 at 09:56 AM..
Yes NJ taxes are out of control but you can move if you like to a cheaper COL state. But if you think it's Utopia, think again.
This is a post I made on another forum concerning moving to the South from Boston.
"The snow never convinced me to move South from the Northeast. Mainly it was the COL in retirement that sent me South.
However the winter storms that I see on my nightly national newscasts has convinced me that I am better off out of the snow belt rather than in it.
Yes it's hot in the summer in NC just like it is in NY, NJ MA, (I've been to Boston on the Fourth) and I use the same method to escape the heat and humidity that I did back home I turn on the A/C the only difference is that my electric bills are 1/3 of what they were up North.
Yes I am in the Buy Bull belt but those people are harmless and they have their own issues to deal with that don't concern me. ( which church we don't like this week)
The only thing about the South that bothers me is the complete lack of concern for quality education among the conservatives here.
Low teacher pay and low student achievement seems to be no big deal as long as we have good college basketball teams.
A few weeks ago a student/player? was dropped from one of the "Name" basketball colleges because of a poor performance in a game the night before.
This is one of these schools I call the Dunk or Flunk U. The only thing you have to pass is a basketball. You don't have to pass your academic classes, we will fix that for you but if you can't put the ball in the basket you're out.
Back to the original question about wanting to move South.
If you're past 60 and or retired and have been shoveling snow for the past few weeks how could you not consider moving South?"
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