“You can read all about the FERS and CSRS systems on the internet. You can continue to think the employee contributions don’t end up financing what they get out of the system if you want, but you’d be NUTS to do so.”
You are wildly misinformed, perhaps because you have been fed propaganda by the government unions. Here are the facts. Under FERS, employee contributions are 7% (6.2% for Social Security and 0.8% for FERS). The tax payer provides almost all funding for FERS (11.2%). For TSP, the employer contributes up to 5%.
I was mistaken about the COLA. The COLA is CPI-W minus 1% unless the CPI is less than 2% when you receive the full CPI-W. No other private or goverment pension plan receives CPI-W minus 1%.
Please dispute my facts with evidence. I doubt that you can provide anything other than union propaganda.
Now, whatever you want to believe the cold, hard facts are that what federal employees who retire finally draw out of their retirement system is fairly much equal to what they contributed out of their after tax salaries to that system.
You can believe Uncle Sam is making this contribution, and that contribution, and hey, look at those bucks over there, but even if they are "credited" to the FERS or CSRS systems, unless they are ever paid out they never really existed.
Then they die ~ and all the money they contributed to the system stays right there. Federal retirement money is NOT inheritable. You can't hand it down to your heirs. When you are gone it stays in the system to be used by other retirees at a later time.
In recent years USPS was charged about double for its retirement contribution needed to make OPMs books balance. The amount overcharged went up to $80 billion according to some estimates, but was, even as OPM admitted, well over $30 bilion.
Remembering that all the USPS funds were coming out of postage paid to send mail, or directly from employee after tax salaries, and none of it came from the taxpayers, you'd think Congress and OPM would have made an "adjustment" such that the employees had their excess contributions returned to them, or retiree payments were increased, or postage rates would be adjusted downward in appropriate categories to kind of "sop up" the excess.
No, Congress passed a law that handed that overcharge to OPM as "found money". It's being paid out to ordinary federal government retirees now, not kept for later use by postal retirees. Plus, Congress decided USPS should be punished for OPM's computational error by paying $5 billion per year IN ADVANCE for future postal retiree medical insurance.
This happens every time someone finds a mistake in the system that's in the favor of the employees ~ Congress simply keeps the money!