retire in 20 yrs on near full pay?....or retire on "disability" over "stress"....or have serious marks against you like our local where one guy was working another job while docked into his cop job and another was banging his married girlfriend while supposedly on his job...that guy quickly "retired" and so now he'll get probably more than most people get working...
I am just tired of it....
They have agree over the years to contracts that have wage increases as well as deferred benefits such as retirement and healthcare in retirement. The politicians (and the people who vote for them)try to not acknowledge the future costs of those promises in their yearly budgets. They kick the can down the road. They have been doing it for at least a generation.
We now see some government entities unable to pay for the benefits that their predecessors had promised. The taxpayers are on the hook, not the now-moved-on politicians who went along with the labor agreements.
In christie-Cuomo land, I understand that the NJ State Pension system is ‘underfunded’ because the governors and the legislatures over the years have not put cash aside to pay for the pension obligations. Incredibly, New York's State Pension system is (reportedly) adequately funded, because of a difference in the laws or state constitution that require municipalities to make annual contributions.
On the other hand, cops in parts of the NY metropolitan, after a year or three, have base salaries approaching $100,000.
Public employees have better unions than the rest of us. The people who work in those jobs got lucky. Instead of bitching about it, we have to get active and make candidates promise that they will act as fiscal conservatives. We can't allow any of them to keep ‘kicking the can down the road”