Posted on 12/10/2011 4:15:53 PM PST by macquire
COLUMBUS, Ohio - After nearly 40 years in public education, Patrick Godwin spends his retirement days running a horse farm east of Sacramento, Calif., with his daughter.
His departure from the workaday world is likely to be long and relatively free of financial concerns, after he retired last July at age 59 with a pension paying $174,308 a year for the rest of his life.
Such guaranteed pensions for relatively youthful government retirees — paid in similar fashion to millions nationwide — are contributing to nationwide friction with the public sector workers. They have access to attractive defined-benefit pensions and retiree health care coverage that most private sector workers no longer do.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
Fed government employees already went from a system of guaranteed retirement funds to the FERS system about 30 or so years ago. FERS Is based on a three tiered plan which includes SS, a 401k and a smaller pension.
“Thanks folks for helping us out when we need to get a start in life.”
You’re complaining about someone getting the retirement that they paid into and earned, yet you are asking for a handout from the other side of your mouth.
Just escaped from your OWNS tent??
“Your payments are only as good as the next election.”
And you sound like a punk on a high horse.
Wake up. You hubs is the exception not the rule. The particular Gubbmint he worked for seems to have been modest and did not rape the taxpayers. But it ain’t just about your situation. There are 3000+ counties, 50 states, one Federal gov’t all with different payment and pension schemes and scams. A bare few might be honest and fair. But by and large the taxpaying private sector that actually produces has been ripped off
Ignore these punks. As evidenced by ben kenobi, they are only concerned about what is in it for them, or that they get their “fair share”; they couldn’t care less if someone worked hard all their lives.
OK so you collect from the taxpayers via the Feds. Big whoop
2012 should be a war against the public sector, against the government rich. There is little downside. Few of them vote Republican.
And his pension also includes rate increases for inflation. So if you want to have enough saved to provide about 3% inflation to your self-funded retirement plan you need to make 6% a year and draw out 4% of the ever so slightly growing balance. Otherwise you are just in harvest mode and could very well run out of money before you run out of life. Even with the 6% plan you begin to harvest at the most critical time in your life, near the end when you have no means at all to recover from losses. Risk. Risk will destroy most private self-funded retirement plans.
Yup, they are part of the 1% alright, the 1% we’ll never know and the 1% we can’t afford.
WE don’t owe these people these lavish benefits we can’t afford for ourselves.
Nobody mentions that government employees average pay MUCH higher than private sector employees plus the government sector employees have better working and retirement benefits.
This is like a parent eating beans and rice so that they can buy their freeloading adult children steak and champagne.
How stupid are we? When do we cut them off?
What? Post 41 was in response to the poster talking about government reducing pensions.
I would prefer simply to welsh, rather than monkey with the tax code.
Some would say it's immoral — even unconservative — for a government to refuse to honor its financial obligations. But, given that citizenship is significantly less voluntary than business ownership, I feel no guilt in voting to favor such an action. And, given a good, Obama-generated crisis, it would be a shame to waste such an opportunity!
Wow, thanks for those talking points from OWS. Obama will be soon proud!
Government employees are just another entitlement class that we can’t afford.
Now, why don’t you go out in the street and play?
Look, there is a problem and no one has the solution. Governments have contractually promised retirement plans that they can no longer deliver. It doesn’t matter if the retirement plans are now considered extravagant or how they got that way. That horse has left the barn. The problem is,what can be done besides threatening hard working people and calling them names? In Ohio SB5 which tried to reign in unions was shot down. There will definitely be a solution to this-budget shortfalls- and it wont be pretty because imo it will all end in collapse. In the meantime, the people on this site who call people getting SS and pensions they have lawfully earned “leeches”, etc., and the clarion call for class warfare is disgusting.
I think one way to show people, if they don’t get it, is to wait until they start to eat and then take the food, right out od their hand and eat it before them.
If they protest, explain that is what the pension plans are doing to them.
“Wait until they start to eat then take the food right out of their mouth and eat it before them”.
Wow. Do you even listen to what you are saying?
Not everybody is capable of putting together the connection between generous state-sponsored pension plans and why the same state had to hike taxes by 15 percent.
If the person, you’re talking to doesn’t get it, he may understand better when you give him an object lesson.
The teats are empty.
Its called bankruptcy.
Pretty simple.
The governments will declare bankruptcy or the equivalent.
The extravagant pensions will be reduced.
The current taxpayers and politicians did not make the promises made 20 years ago, and they are not obligated to fulfill them.
I say again: the teat suckers never turned down any of the goodies and were well aware of the waste and fraud and sloth in the system that they chose to remain a part of. I have never seen an overworked government employee. Never.
Deployed soldiers don’t count. But even peacetime soldiers may be underpaid, but they are not overworked and get pensions quickly and can retire at 38 with a nice pension with benefits and work eleswhere.
I wish one of these think tanks would do a study of each state and find out how many layers of Government we are paying for ,how many fire depts. Public works,etc at a given time, all the current retirees,current people in those positions and how much the cost is and is Projected to be in a Generation
I reread my original post on this subject. Not once was there ever a single instance of name calling. I believe you threw the ad hominem attack.
I simply stated the fact that this guy is amongst the 1% since he has a pension that would need a personal wealth of over $4,500,000 to produce an income of nearly $175,000. Unions had orchestrated and know-nothing politicians have made promises with taxpayer money that simply can’t be fulfilled. The only rational solution is to... cut. The only other one I know of is to inflate the currency, leave the benefit the same and inflate out of it. That option does the most damage to all and not just those who receive the pensions that must be remedied. The effect to the pensioner is the same... less buying power. The public can’t provide what it doesn’t have.
Companies go bankrupt all the time and the result is that they can’t / won’t fund the pension or other promises they have made. That is why the pension trust was established but it is out of money as well. The result of a pension fund being turned over to the trust is at least a 50% reduction in benefits. This whole affair is why, at the tender age of 22, when I went to work for a public sector company I read the statements of their pension fund.
Just like making a contract for services, you have to be careful of low bid and you have to make sure that the vendor can deliver as promised. Unfinished business is very messy.
For those who are in the midst of retirement, their benefits should go on, they have no time to recover. The rest has to be cut or the terms changed.
While it may be legal to teach for a half pension then go to another state where service from another state is credited and work 10 years to collect yet another pension... it is wrong. Who ever thought this was something that is fiscally feasible, either on the receiving end or the giving end, was insane. The receiver probably knew it was not possible when they bought into the deal. They wanted something too good to be true to be so and it just isn’t.
I’m sorry for those who made a foolish bargain with the public sector as well as I am sorry for those in the private sector who have agreed to sell their time for less than it is worth and for those whose jobs have been outsourced. It is bad and it will get much worse and will only get much much worse if benefits are not cut and future terms are not changed.
This is all hard cold fact and has nothing to do with class warfare. Only the threatened would not want to understand. I would be pretty testy / scared as well if I had been paid and benefited well for many years and expecting the great deal to simply go on when I quit working. Some of these people have known the value of their retirement and had to know they were being compensated well outside the market rate for their services. Anything too good to be true probably isn’t true and only exists on borrowed time.
FERS was created so Fed workers must support Soc Sec. It has one good feature, the matching 401K component. But unlike the old CSRS where the Fed worker can retire at 55 with 30 years of service, the Soc Sec minimum retirement age is what the FERS worker most likely use to determine when they want to retire. Before freepers complain, FERS and CSRS are available for all to see. No one complained when the economy was booming and private salaries and benefits were better then gov ones. In fact people who join the fed gov were ridiculed as noncompetitive losers by the ones who worked in corporate world. Now many of them unemployed are banging the fed gov door for a job.
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