In Yonkers, more than 100 retired police officers and firefighters are collecting pensions greater than their pay when they were working. One of the youngest, Hugo Tassone, retired at 44 with a base pay of about $74,000 a year. His pension is now $101,333 a year.
It’s what the system promised, said Mr. Tassone, now 47, adding that he did nothing wrong by adding lots of overtime to his base pay shortly before retiring. “I don’t understand how the working guy that held up their end of the bargain became the problem,” he said.
Despite a pension investigation by the New York attorney general, an audit concluding that some police officers in the city broke overtime rules to increase their payouts and the mayor’s statements that future pensions should be based on regular pay, not overtime, these practices persist in Yonkers.
He’s only 47, and his pension three years after retirement is $27,000 higher than his basic pay was, and he doesn’t see anything wrong?
Both my parents are probably going to end up working to the day they die, my dad in a hospital as an EMT and my mom as a school nurse, because their pensions would not be enough to live on and Social Security is already in the red and about to go belly up.
This guy has his head buried in the sand and when NY runs out of cash, he’d better have used his outrageous pension payments up until then to change his lifestyle and learn how to live on the cheap.
And to think that American military personnel can retire with only one half of their basic pay after 20 years of service in most cases. I must’ve been in the wrong line of work!
Same here. I’ll need to work until I drop dead. The American public
is just beginning to get stuck with the bill for overly generous
retirement pensions being made to so-called “public servants”.
The American taxpayer is headed into several decades of
impoverished servitude to our “public servants”.
THIS is the two Americas: those with public sector employment and those without. Obviously these deals will have to be modified or there will be complete economic collapse…
All the above may be true, but is that the fault of the worker? Did the workers (police) set the pension policy? Who did? Who voted for the people that set the policy?
Who is responsible?
Is the pension agreement a contract? Do contracts mean anything, or are they just bits of paper? How many people want to put a target on their chest and strap a gun on their hip and walk out their front door every morning for 20 years? Did those that complain about the pensions that the police receive ever make the effort to become a policeman? No? Why not?
They get paid what they get paid because it is an intrinsically dangerous profession with enormous stress and burnout and also requires a degree to do. I don’t hear much complaining about the retirements that the elected officials receive. How much does the Chief get? Why go after the average worker when there are so many more expensive and lavish retirements in the system that are given to the Mayor and other higher up officials?
And another thing…
What is the divorce rate among police?
What is the suicide rate among police?
How do these rates compare with the general population?
Where were these complaints when these brave men and women offered to serve? Why weren’t they put forward before they fullfilled their part of the contract? What kind of people promise a specific payment for a specific work to be done, and then, when the work is done (20 years of it)…then they complain that the price was too high!?! That ‘s just a little bit late don’t ya think? The time to change that little bit of information was at the start of the work, when they could reasonably accept or decline to do it…not after they have done their work!!!
How about this…how about if there isn’t enough money to pay the police what was contractually promised to them for work that they did…how about we take that amount of money away from welfare recipients that have done NOTHING to get paid taxpayer money, and how about we use THAT money to pay for the contractually agreed pensions? How about that? How about we shut down the public libraries, stop the school breakfast and lunches, etc. etc. AND PAY THE DEBT OWED BY CONTRACT to the police that literally put their lives on the line to protect and serve?
If we have money to just give away to people that didn’t do a darned thing to earn it…ever…then we can certainly pay for contractually agreed upon pensions. Pay the pensions first, then give away the freebies to those that do nothing contribute to society.
How much should the policemen that went into Times Square and removed the bomb get paid? Do any of the folks complaining about the pensions want to volunteer to remove any future bombs? Any of you folks want to go undercover narcotics? How about infiltrating a crime syndicate? Any takers? Do you want to go into a neighbors house during a domestic dispute? How do you feel about rounding up prostitutes? Do you want to volunteer to do that? What’s holding you back? Come on…think of that juicy pension! Man, that should make it all worthwhile, huh?
Public employee unions and the politicians who want their campaign contributions have created this mess. They thought they had it figured that they didn’t need to worry about meeting their obligations because they could always get more from the taxpayers. I fault the politicians the most – they could have said “no” to the unions, but didn’t.
Hey Sick & Tired, I’m fine with paying what we owe, while of course we modify what we say we owe to those coming up the chain.
The same should be done with the Social Security mess — we need to raise the age of retirement, pay what we owe, and tell those under 45 to swing for themselves.
Of course . . . that would involve people being allowed to opt out of the system, which would expose to the whole light of day the massive pyramid fraud that has been perpetrated . . . but that’s another story.
That would be acceptable, in my opinion. It makes me ill when I think how the Bush proposal to allow folks to take some of their Social Security payments and put it into their own accounts was villified and demonized by the socialists (both Rs and Ds) now in charge…the very ones that have led us to the brink of ruin.
It also makes me ill to think how CEOs that literally run the companies into bankruptcy, hurting the economy, their employees, and their stock holders, STILL get multi-million dollar payouts (some paid for with taxpayer money) despite their utter failures. They get HUGE payoffs regardless of performance…yet police pensions are controversial? (Hey, isn’t taking taxpayer money to pay CEO bonuses for running their companies into bankruptcy a redistribution of wealth by government? Isn’t that “socialism for the rich” at the expense of everyone else? How do we have tax money to pay for their pensions and bonuses for being miserable failures in business, but we don’t have tax money to pay a policeman that served honorably and SUCCESSFULLY for 20+ years, when we made a contract with that policeman?)
Why are police paid what they are paid? Isn’t that “what the market will bear� To bring the skillsets required to do police work from the labor pool, the value of their work has been set by the market. If the cost is too much, then a new skill set needs to be defined. Perhaps more people would be willing to become police for lower pay if the public’s expectations were not so high. Folks need to think about that the next time a police officer is sued for “police brutality†or the next time an officer’s career is ended because some crackhead that was resisting arrest got an extra punch in the heat of the moment. Our litigious society, armed with video cameras, love to play armchair generals and second guess the men and women that were literally just in life and death struggles and persecute the police for any infraction…no matter the provocation or precedeing circumstances.
So, our expectations are completely out of touch with the reality of human nature. (This holds especially true for our 18 year old sleep deprived soldiers that we send into warzones with terrorists dressed as civilians – expecting our soldiers to act as police, being more concerned with the “rights†of terrorists and terroist supporters than with winning or even surviving – despite the fact that they may have just taken sniper fire from a “civilian†residence, or just witnessed 3 or 4 of their friends having their limbs blown off by an IED some 10,000 miles away from home – we somehow expect these people to be as “civilized†as they would be at a football game!) We expect police to enter the homes of people having a domestic dispute, where it is unknown if there are firearms but where there is a relative certainty that there are at least a normal set of kitchen cutlery and golf clubs or baseball bats, and make flawless legal decisions at 2 or 3 AM and be professionally detached. What is amazing is that there are people that have that skillset.
By all means, offer the recruits less money. See what the market will bear. See if the expectations we have will line up with the reality of anyone deciding to become a police officer, to literally put their lives on the line, for peanuts.
But remember, all this talk of a free market includes guilds and unions and they have a right to negotiate the price of labor just as much as a bank can negotiate terms for a mortgage. Let the markets work. I think that they have been working and that the price set for police work was fairly negotiated and agreed to. The problem is, the people’s representatives paid with a credit card (with the knowledge and endorsement via elections of the people) and now the people do not want to pay the bill.
Let the markets work and enforce contracts. If people want a cheaper police force, they will likely have to change their expectations of what the police will and will not do for the money. Because, in the end, that is what this all boils down to. Will a person value the money they are being offered to be a policeman enough to take on the job with the particular requirements that are being demanded.
I wouldn’t do it. You couldn’t pay me $75K a year or even $100K a year to go pick up a bomb in Times Square or enter the crack house to arrest the dealer, etc. No thanks! I did my time in the military. I offered my life for peanuts…less money than what a typical CEO blows on an annual bar tab. I’ve got some bits of paper saying how the “American People are Forever Grateful†and some shiny metal things to put on my chest…and you know, most Americans are oblivious to the sacrifices that the police and military make for them.
So, by all means, let the market forces work and see what people are willing to pay for the type of police they will accept and see what people are willing to come forward and do the job required for the pay offered. That’s what capitalism is all about.
Not to change the subject of this article, but New York’s pension troubles aren’t the only example of pension abuse: The pensions enjoyed by our politicians in Washington are REALLY juicy!
RE: “If people want a cheaper police force, they will likely have to change their expectations of what the police will and will not do for the money. Because, in the end, that is what this all boils down to.”
Nah — I think if the people want lower pensions for those in the government, they need to pay close attention to whom they elect to the positions of budget allocation.
RE: “It also makes me ill to think how CEOs that literally run the companies into bankruptcy, hurting the economy, their employees, and their stock holders, STILL get multi-million dollar payouts (some paid for with taxpayer money) despite their utter failures. They get HUGE payoffs regardless of performance…”
Right — those are however, usually built into their contracts based on known and enumerated and measurable performance goals. Those performance goals are based on what they accomplish during their term. In my own city, one bank in terrible trouble has had four different CEOs in the past 2.5 years. Each one will get “bonuses” based on what the heck they can pull out of the ditch during their brief tenure before they throw up their hands and decide that the risk [Sarbanes Okley] and anxiety is too much for them.
The way the market needed to work — and I suppose it did — is that people needed to cease supporting with their checking accounts and corporate business the original CEO. In looking back over the history of this bank, that original CEO should never have been supported with our money — but his bank, regrettably, was.
RE: “(Hey, isn’t taking taxpayer money to pay CEO bonuses for running their companies into bankruptcy a redistribution of wealth by government?”
Right — that’s what TARP should never have been voted for by both Republicans and Democrats. We have poured billions down the black hole of these banks and it will essentially yield very little. What needed to happen was what money the government did offer should have been given to the FDIC in order to manage the resultant bank failures.
That’s why I won’t be voting for *any* Republican who voted for that bill.
But banks can’t recruit CEOs of banks without performance bonuses. So without allowing them, the State would doom banks to not be able to receive good CEOs in response to the losses of all the baddies.
Again, I expect we’re closer in opinion than it appears. I’m fine with paying both bank CEOs and policemen what we are contractually obligated to pay.
I’m not fine with not allowing banks to fail and with bailing out banks. But neither am I fine with inflating government employees’ wages to grotesque proportions with their retirement, medical, and other benefits. The only way those things won’t happen is by our electing people who are committed to Constitutional government.
Hi Sarah,
Actually, I think that what we have here is a case of extreme agreement. ; )