The pension thing is a major, major issue with no easy solution. I think there will eventually be a federal bailout but it will be ugly and full of can kicking.
This is a really gross post in my opinion. Don’t be ikes.
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Are you aware of how much political power state employees unions have at the state and local level?
These people aren’t close to innocent in this.
I don’t think it’s right to tax poor and middle class citizens radically harder so that state retirees can earn 60k+ in retirement.
It would be like in 25 years people saying we need to wipe out everyone’s 401k. Pensions were negotiated compensation and stealing that from the people who earned it is a really bad movie.
Obviously in hindsight the way most pensions were implemented was horrible. But that is not the fault of the beneficiary, who upheld their end of the contract.
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The can kicking has been going on for 20 years or more already.
401k plans can be made worthless. We’re about to witness them taking a massive haircut from either a currency devaluation or a market crash.
Pensions shouldn’t be made worthless… But they should take a large cut.
99.9% of the people collecting pensions are blameless here. And a big chunk of them gave up the right to collect social security as a requisite for joining the pension system. Stealing their retirement out from under them would be gross. Just completely misdirected ire.
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They voted for who they voted for. Sucks for them. We’re talking about a large group of boomers many of whom were cops. I’m not that sad.
Wat. You’re talking about stealing earned retirement from a big chunk of the working class. Not being sad about that is very weird imo.
Who got trump elected again? Sometimes bad things happen to people.
Social security age has already been pushed back, by the time I get to collect SS the retirement age will be around 70 years old. I am going to get way less from SS than I put into it or than i was “promised” to get out of it. It makes sense to do the something similar with pensions. They can get a cut taken out just like everyone else in my generation who will pay into SS for 35 years and most of whom have no pension to fall back on.
You’re going to have to define working class. Most of the pension payments are going to people who are going to make a decent chunk more than the median salary of the US from those pensions. In some states like CA double dipping is super common… and these people weren’t poorly paid (and had great benefits) while they were working to boot.
I mean if you want to trot out the teachers of some shithole like OK as your example that’s fine, but I suspect that if I dig into the details we’ll discover that their pension already sucks.
I’m talking about a bunch of middle class+ mostly white people discovering that the promises made to them by their local politicians were hot air. That’s how it goes sometimes. The Boomers as a group voted for some really terrible politicians, and I absolutely refuse to bail them out at my own expense. I didn’t do any of this, and our generation has never voted for anything but a return to sanity. The kind of sanity that the Boomers inherited and then promptly threw in the dumpster.
Show me a large group of Boomers and I’m going to struggle to find any empathy for them or the political/economic choices they’ve made.
Stealing earned retirement is wrong, full stop. Pension reform is fine when necessary. I didn’t realize either of these were controversial positions.
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The incentive problem is obvious. State and local politicians get elected promising ponies and are long gone when it’s time to pay up. This has been clear as day for decades. The unions are going to have to take a haircut in exchange for a bailout. This crap is literally bankrupting Illinois and the day of reckoning is fast approaching.
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Yeah promising yourself something great at someone else’s expense is not the same thing as ‘earning’ it.
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This right here is why my sympathy level is extremely low. This has been obvious since the late 80’s… but they kept doing the same deal over and over again with the plan being that they wouldn’t have to pay the taxes when it blew up. This is exactly like climate change and I, for one, am super fucking sick of it.
If you guys can figure out how to tax the rich enough to pay for the pensions that’s totally fine, I wish you good luck. It’s not going to work though. That money is fucking gone.
The treasury just dumped literal trillions to big corporations and you’re arguing that we can’t afford to bail out states because the money is gone. Wat.
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That’s the same thing. Devaluing the currency is just an indirect way of giving pensions a haircut. The pension situation is fucking huge dude. It’s waaaay more than a trillion dollars.
I know there are some pension systems are in trouble. There are also many that aren’t. My point was that instead of railing against these massive corporate giveaways that do literally nothing for working people you are here on unstuck politics railing against middle class people collecting the retirement that they were promised. I get that you can do both, it just seems insane to me to suggest what you’re suggesting in the current environment.
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If you guarantee healthcare as a right and a sufficient minimum guaranteed income as a right, things like this pension derail don’t really matter.
End of the day most issues come back to the need to guarantee these two things to everyone.
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