If he truly worked “decades” that is a fairly meager pension for a civil servant.
Of course the devil may be in the details.
Yes it is. CNN must have spent months finding this guy.
The average city employee pension is $19k. For police, $30k, not inlcuding cola. Throw in some of the higher pensions of $100k, and the obvious groundwork has been laid for the commons there to be pissed with the cuts.
Welcome to my world of 30 years as LE supervisor. That seems very much in line. Take 1/4th off the top for property taxes alone and tell me it’s easy to live off the remainder. No government freebies here.
Ditto...hard to find a municipal or state pensioner who gets a check that small each month. I’m guessing he never advanced beyond an entry-level position, or has lots of money coming out for alimony, child support (yes, I realize he’s 69, but you never know), or back taxes.
In fact, the only retirees who get pension benefits on that scale are military retirees who leave the service as an E-6 after 20 years. Their monthly check (after taxes and deductions) is about $1600 a month.
On the other hand, it’s fairly easy to find retired public employees at the local, state and federal level who receive more than $100,000 annually. Lois Lerner’s pension as a “guvmint” lawyer is $115,000 a year; there are a number of retired cops in big cities and suburban communities pulling in that much, thanks to pension calculations based on their last three years of service, a period when their bosses (and the police union) make sure they maximize overtimes, to guarantee a bigger retirement check. I also recall an article about a woman who retired as a senior official with the BART system in northern California; her annual pension is worth more than $300,000 a year.
Yet, the only group of retirees being singled out for cuts (outside of basket cases like Detroit) are military members. It’s fine to pay six figures to a political hack like Lerner, but we can’t be overly generous to a retired Air Force TSgt, Navy/USCG PO1, or a SSG in the Army or Marine Corps who actually earned their pension.