Teacher, teacher, can ya teach me???
PING!
The sweet part is if they had taught- or, maybe, been allowed to teach- their students then there might have been money to pay their pensions!
Depends on the state. Currently the Teachers Retirement System in Texas is what social security was supposed to be. There actually IS a giant pot of money earning interest, not an IOU to be paid by taxpayers at a future date. The problem is every two years the teachers have to send a hoard of lobbyists to the statehouse to make sure their retirement fund doesn't get merged into the states general fund.
It is an interesting mindset. Teachers are generally a lefty bunch. They, or at least their organizations, are economically literate enough to know they don't want to depend on a state IOU but the general ideology forces them to have the state control that money rather than distribute it into privately owned defined contribution retirement plans.
They should change over to the pay matching, 5 year vested 401(d)s that the southern states have.
I guess its more aggravating regarding teachers because they already work very short years, with lots of days off, and top health/sickleave/sabbatical/etc...
we won't even talk about the free breast augementation and nose jobs for the lovely teachers in Buffalo NY...
my idea?...stop offering pensions immediately and offer only to set up 401ks with a modest contribution from the govt....whatever you do with your 401k as far as investment is totally up to the worker, and sometimes that would mean a much greater pay out in the end......
for current teachers, such as the ones in NYS where they pay no state income tax, establish a small pension fee OR at least tax these pensions...with that money going into the a 401k fund for future retirees...
Too late. In case the author hasn't noticed all the teachers in state-financed schools are ed majors. Top talent majored in the sciences, engineering, the arts (not art history or art criticism, actually doing an art) or the humanities (at a top school), not education.
That's not a matter at issue in the unsustainable (non-)funding of defined benefit pension plans.
This isn’t rocket science. Any local, county or state legislature can cancel a teacher’s contract. Not a thing teachers can do about that.
Throw in cops, fire personnel, city utilities workers, mayors, city councils, county/city controllers, administrators, water and power employees, and on and on and on.
And on and on.
We are being economically gang banged by these folks, many of which are now unionized....
BTW, all of these government lottery style benefits and gold plated tax paid pensions will eventually choke us all off.
Public servants?
Riiiiight.
You could offer teachers a 401K contribution of $20,000 a year on top of their salary and the unions will still shoot it down.
Two reasons :
1> The union leaders can’t control pension money. They’d never have an opportunity to get their filthy hands on it. Their #1 source of “side income” would be lost. Pension funds are *the* reason why these scummy parasites LOVE being in charge of a union. The dues are nothing compared to the fees associated with managing a pension fund.
2> The teachers are trained to believe that the only path to retirement is through the union (via the taxpayers of course). I’ve discussed this MANY times with teachers ... each and every one turned into a screaming lunatic upon hearing about pension alternatives.
Taxpayers, in the long run, would be better off if we’d give teachers a crazy annual 401K contribution on top of their salary ... the salary is a one time charge that’s easy to budget.
The open-ended number of years a pension is drawn is impossible to budget/project. If the retirement money could be a fixed, annual cost, I think you’d see things shape up quickly.
The good news is everybody feels good about themselves and their gender identity, anyway.
One thing we can do is to start supporting Republicans that actually try to enact pension reform. Gov. Tom Corbett of PA tried to tackle the govt pension problem and the unions poured money into the campaign against him and advertised hard against him for two years. We threw him under the bus because he wasn’t pure enough of a conservative for us and let him get defeated when he ran for re-election. We now have Democrat Wolf for governor of PA who is totally owned by unions. The problem just got exponentially worse.
As students have not been educated to even the most minimally acceptable levels for generations, and as teachers knew they were not educating their students, teachers have:
1. Improperly enriched themselves.
2. Committed a massive fraud upon the taxpayers.
3. Knowingly advanced students who had not mastered the course material taught by said teachers.
4. Participated in education curriculum which favored socialism ofer American Constitution bounded government.
Consequent to the actions of said teachers:
1. Generations of students were not educated.
2. Said students were then unable to find gainful employment due to their inadequate knowledge/skills.
3. Teachers have, by their dereliction of their duties as educators, a liability due to the degraded students they claimed to educate, but in fact did not so educate.
Conclusion:
1. Teacher pension benefits may be legally rescinded because such benefits were fraudulently obtained.
2. A case can be made that assets of teachers may also be forfeit because they were obtained by fraud.
Recommended Actions:
1. Reduce or eliminate teacher pensions.
2. A national discussion should be held to ascertain what should be done to address the issue of teacher assets improperly/illegally acquired.