There’s a class war coming to the world of government pensions.
The haves are retirees who were once state or municipal workers. Their seemingly guaranteed and ever-escalating monthly pension benefits are breaking budgets nationwide.
The have-nots are taxpayers who don’t have generous pensions. Their 401(k)s or individual retirement accounts have taken a real beating in recent years and are not guaranteed. And soon, many of those people will be paying higher taxes or getting fewer state services as their states put more money aside to cover those pension checks.
At stake is at least $1 trillion. That’s trillion, with a “t,” as in titanic and terrifying.
AAh the hippy babyboomers: Ruined the church, ruined society and ruined the economy. Only generation EVER to raise house prices for their own gain and ensure their own children cannot get on the ladder. And now to cap it all they want their inflated pensions paid for by the generation they bankrupt…..
Harsh perhaps but with more than a hint of truth…
Perhaps even more harsh #1; the babyboomers made an alliance with the Devil (SEIU and its ilk) to get those gold plated pensions. That is, they signed on for socialism for their own benefit, not caring that their children will not live with the freedoms and liberty they enjoyed unless their children kick the leeches to the curb; with or without a revolution to do it.
it’s all about me: a slogan that will live in infamy.
Someone works for 20, 30 or even 40 years at a government job and they feel that they’ve earned what has been promised in their contracts over all of those years. Whether one would call them deserving or delusional, the hard truth is that a system which rewards a couple of decades of hard work with at least that same length of time in roughly equal dollars is absolutely unsustainable.
I refer back to a story in the news a month or so ago, where a New York firefighter had retired at age 43, and will now earn $101,000 per year, plus adjustments over time for cost of living.
Now I have total respect for this type of civil servant at least, but if he should live to be 80 years old (hardly far fetched), someone show me how that math can ever work without sinking the ship it’s tied to.
I’ll go with delusional.