So the firemen just walk away from the fire at the end of the shift? Lord you folks never think. I think you live in some fantasy land where nothing bad ever happens.
They take the job and know what it involves. My point was that firemen have to make a good wage that society can afford to pay and that taxpayers can afford to fund as a pension when they retire. That is true for every position of employment with a retirement.
Not sure what part of that was difficult to understand and I am in the field. It is not just about salary any more - the smart folks pick a job with an eye towards the financial health of the entity in the future. I could go to California and do my same job and make 80k more a year with more retirement, but I question the sustainability of “the pension fund” I would be relying on based on the spending habits and history of the politicians who control it.
This is true for all government workers and many private company workers with pension plans as well. Why should people in rural America be asked to subsidize patrolmen salaries that are way more than what a Chief of Police makes in their district? Same thing for an auto-worker or utility lineman.
It will be a big problem. People can get mad about it, but it is based on nothing more than a reasonable and logical cost/benefit analysis. Do you want to subsidize janitors in the NYC school system who make 120k a year and have a cadillac retirement plan?
I did not have a vote for that so why should we “bail them out?”
For fire departments, building blazes — catastrophic or not — have become infrequent. Firefighters responded to 487,500 structure fires across the United States in 2013, which means each of the nation’s 30,000 fire departments saw just one every 22 days, on average. And yet, taxpayers are paying more people to staff these departments 24-7. As a result, the amount of money shelled out for local fire services more than doubled from 1987 to 2011, to $44.8 billion, accounting for inflation.