Posted on 01/25/2016 3:24:33 AM PST by VitacoreVision
If you are less than 55 your SS retirement age is 67 for “full Retirement” which means little. “Full retirement” is just a marketing mechanism for the date they wish you to retire. You could retire at 62 or 70 or anywhere in between. But SS is hardly retirement for most. Its a minimum wage to help prevent elder poverty. To adjust SS they need to move the range, which has been in place for 30 years, back to 63 to 71. Even moving it to 62.5 to 70.5 would put the SS system in balance. Its not far off now.
The real issue is government worker pensions. Federal workers can retire at 50. And many States have workers that can retire in their 50’s as well. California and Illinois are going to follow Detroit down the rabbit hole of pension debt. Besides medical benefits, its really government pensions, even at the federal level, that are making our debt grow out of control. Moving back their retirement age to somewhere around 65 would solve a lot of problems. That is a lot of productive tax paying hours to offset retirees. America would not have to import labour. We have it now. We just need to make these people work as long as the rest of us.
Also, if the economists calculated wealth by including a pension as a valued asset (like an annuity is), you would find that our wealth disparity is nowhere near what they are saying. Almost all full government retirees are millionaires.
I agree; an acquaintance retired as a local cop at 46 (with 25 years on the job), and another faces mandatory retirement at 55 (understandable, given the nature of police work - though they shouldn’t collect massive pensions for this). This problem is acute here in NJ; our government worker caste is strangling the state’s finances, and nobody wants to buy a piece in our massive IOU by moving or opening a business here. Our government workers are our upper middle class now (just based on salary/benefits, never mind pensions and retirement benefits), and taxpayers (individual and corporate) are responding by fleeing in droves.
They have become an incestuous breed apart, intermarrying and intermingling because nobody else relates to them (or outright despises them). Years ago the Asbury Park Press released all public school teachers’ salaries here in NJ as public information, and the teachers lost the battle for hearts & minds immediately.
Your cop is probably working another job and collecting the pension. The people who came up with this plan were politicians who only cared about balancing a short term budget but will pay as much as 10 times more in the long run if this guy lives to 85, and there is an escalator in that pension. Remember that politician is a government employee too.
Oh definitely; they are also part of the government worker caste. The problem is that when their contempt for little people isn’t even concealed anymore, the little people (and their employers) scatter.
A nearby town (Rutherford NJ) had a police chief retire a couple of years ago, and they owed him $400K in unused sick time. They had to work out a 3 year payment plan (since they didn’t have the money), on top of paying his pension AND the salary/benefits of his replacement. This is why NJ, which at one time had been a bustling center of industry/commerce, is dying quickly.
Nope, no bias: “As millions flee war-torn countries where anti-Semitism is rampant...”
SHOULD state, “As millions (mostly men of combat age) flee war-torn countries (for countries half-way around the word with the biggest Socialist give-aways, instead of other/closer Muslim countries) where anti-Semitism is rampant
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