Posted on 06/22/2015 5:37:20 AM PDT by george76
When Dorval R. Carter Jr. returned to the CTA last month as the transit agency’s president, he had to temporarily give up a sweet pension deal that had paid him three-quarters of a million dollars in just five and a half years.
Taking advantage of a little-known early-retirement incentive offered by the CTA, Carter left his second stint with the agency in 2009 and started collecting a $137,229-a-year pension the same month he turned 52, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times ..
Carter didn’t retire, though. He moved to Washington, D.C., to take a post as a top lawyer in resident Barack Obama’s U.S. Department of Transportation, where he would rise to the post of acting chief of staff, making $146,450 a year.
Double-dipping as a federal government official while also collecting a pension from the CTA allowed Carter to take home a combined taxpayer-subsidized income that reached $283,679 a year, records show.
Now 57, Carter collected $754,762 in pension payouts between November 2009 and this April, when he accepted Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s offer to return to the CTA for his third stint there, this time as its $235,000-a-year boss.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicago.suntimes.com ...
NEW LAW: NO GOVERNMENT PENSIONS UNTIL AGE 65
This 20-and-out is for the birds
MILITARY EXCLUDED
Better yet, make them live like the rest of us.
Defined contribution, not defined benefit, retirement plans.
We are all private citizens. We should be responsible for our own financial well-being.
I agree. One of the biggest problems with the economy is the regulators aren’t forced to participate in it either during their working years or during retirement. When you absolve people from participating in the push and pull of market cycles, it warps their view of reality. Forcing all public sector employees into defined contribution plans would be a nice dose of shock therapy for how the rest of the world lives.
And if I were Mr Transit Authority, I wouldn’t get too excited. States can’t declare bankruptcy...but cities and quasi-public entities like transit authorities can...
One of the biggest rallying cry at the public sector union hall in 2016 will be “protect your retirement”.
As a broad proposition, however, public pensions should be transitioned to defined contribution.
So what? It's a volunteer military. They are free to leave after their enlistment is up which is, what?, 2 or 4 years depending?
A soldier can retire at 40 and get a pension and then get a government job and get another pension when he retires. That's double-dipping. Is that what he or she fought for? So others can provide for their lavish retirements?
Yep, as a nominally disabled veteran, and my father was a career SGM, I still say a military pension should kick in at 65.
Just because somebody served in the Armed forces shouldn’t give them a free ride for the rest of their life. A guy could go in at 18, and “retire” at 38. That’s just not right.
When I worked there in the ‘80’s and early ‘90’s, a superintendent-level or above person retiring after 25 years of service would get (as I recall it) something like 70% of their base salary (average of last 5 years of service) for life.
Many of these retirees would go on to second careers working as consultants to the CTA, making at least as much as they were while they were on the job.
The downside to working for the Authority was that your salary didn’t keep up with what the private marketplace could offer (25-40% less, I would say), and you had to put up with years with no raises at all, lots of bureaucracy, etc.
Not a perfect system, but I guess it was felt that you had to offer some incentive to attract and retain people.
By the way, that goes for Socialist Security as well. I'm all for doing away with SS and encouraging people to provide for their own retirement.
It’s interesting how “double dipping” works. As a retired teacher getting a state pension, 60% of the social security I’d otherwise be entitled to is withheld, so that I don’t benefit from double dipping. Yet the same concept is not applied to people at the top of the food chain.
Double dipping?
If you work for Mcdonald’s for twenty years, then move over to Burger King for twenty; is that double dipping?
And Social Security too!
My father was career Navy and collected into his 90’s! My mother still collects!
He did thirty years, then on to another career into his 70’s!
The main issue is that people live much longer now.
My father did very well, but many do a quick burst of 20-30 and not many job offers waiting.
West Point 1985, very nice, but what do you have that relates to this business? We could start you as a management trainee...
Know a guy,a ring knocker and helicopter pilot, took years to get some traction.
Serve up-or-out, so potentially you can serve 15 years, go to war, get shot at, and then at 15yrs, get riffed and be gone, not vested in any pension, no 401 with matching funds, nothing. In the civilian world you can work and be vested in a retirement scheme at 15-yrs and move on. . .why not military?
Military moves you all the time and you write a blank check to Uncle Sam when you enter, payable up to your life. Somehow I don't think Target or Bank of America demands your life, and in fact, those places fire you if you fight some robber threatening your life.
Families are another factor. Moving means uplifting the family constantly; wife can't really get her own career going, kids going to multiple high schools, bases usually surrounded by gawd-awful and dangerous parts of town, if near a town at all.
Comparing military retirement with civilian retirement is akin to comparing apples and oranges.
Not at all alike.
See Post 13, please.
BTW. . .define “lavish retirement”
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