>>This has nothing to do with workers doing something bad. It has to do with their expectations of getting paid in the manner they were promised.
If you don’t get paid what you were promised, do you just shrug your shoulders and say, “Well, that’s OK”?
If the politicians vote in a new tax and the people say they can’t afford it, does the government just shrug and say, “Well, that’s OK”?
Why are workers the only people in America who are ever expected to do more for less, and to just lower their expectations?
“Why are workers the only people in America who are ever expected to do more for less, and to just lower their expectations?”
I expect folks will be pissed, and there will be no end to the sob stories, some real, some feigned. None of that matters.
In the end, there simply isn’t enough money to pay everyone in full.
This happens in the private sector all the time. Nobody cares. In the end nobody will care about these folks either.
It’s their bad luck. They will have to figure it out, just like folks always have had to.
The other thing to consider is that if pensions were fully funded there would be far fewer govt emplosses, because their cost would be realized in current year budiets. But then big bureaucracies would have not grown to direct every facet of our lives.
So what needs to happen is to haircut pensioners now, fully fund present workers pensions, and accept that you will have to fire a sizeable chunk of non-retirees to make the budgets work, causing further fiscal drains on pension funds because fewer will be paying in.
It’s a true fiscal disaster, but it isn’t one society as a whole owes these govt pensioners. They are on their own, just like everyone else.