While I agree that people should keep their noses out of other people’s business, it is the taxpayer’s business when public employees retire, or at what level of compensation.
It is the taxpayer’s business because there isn’t a single defined benefit public employee pension plan in the US where the public employees have contributed/invested a sum of money during their working careers that will cover the expected payouts of defined benefits for their expected lifetime after retirement. Where systems like CalPERS used to assume an 8% return on their investments to grow their assets, they’re now seeing a 1.1% return (for 2011) and this means that CalPERS is having to go to the legislature and have their pension plan’s shortfalls augmented out of the general account for that year’s benefit payouts.
Illinois and California are realizing this, as are an increasing number of cities and counties all over the country. The defined benefit pension is mathematically unsustainable in the face of increased lifespans due to rapid advances in medical science, and in states like California and Illinois, where enough public employees have gamed the system to fatten their pension benefit stream just before they retired, it isn’t even an issue of lifespans. It is an issue that there are loopholes in the pension benefit computations that are allowing some people to game the system for huge rewards after retirement.
It is MY business....
so any of the sanctimonious "don't tell me when to retire" people want to give up their fed/county/state pensions and live their lives ...fine...until then, its an obscene system and totally insane and totally unsustainable...period
this is the problem with democracy...eventually everyone votes to give themselves more and more and fewer and fewer are actually paying for it....
if the public just stops working and stops giving taxes, then the pensions of all the govt employees stops as well.......