I have a friend who retired in NJ from teaching. He gets 2200 a month. Hardly an inflated pension for 40 years of teaching. I think Administrators get big bucks but not the teachers.
Search * unfunded pension liabilities* for your state. This is a huge problem nation-wide.
By law, a teachers retirement is funded by their after taxes contributions in CT. Then these retirement payouts are taxed again by the state income tax.
State fund administrators are supposed to invest the monies to sustain the system.
In CT: **As of its last biennial actuarial evaluation in 2012, Connecticut had $9.7 billion in assets and $23 billion in liabilities in its State Employees’ Retirement System (SERS), meaning that only 42.3 percent of its obligations were funded, and $13.3 billion, or about 58 percent, were unfunded. While an 80 percent funded ratio (20 percent unfunded) is generally considered healthy, Connecticut is one of nine states, according to CNBC, that have a ratio of less than 60 percent, and among those nine, it is second from the bottom of the list, just behind Illinois.**