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This retired math teacher...

By Owen Paine on Wednesday August 11, 2010 01:57 PM

... wants more from YOU!!

That's the sort of headlines you're gonna be seeing pretty soon, if the tyke shown below is any indication:

Here's a column of his, run recently at Manhattan's fabled New York Spinal Tap. It's exactly the sort of thing that upper West Side America deserves and oughta admire.

Battle Looms Over Huge Costs of Public Pensions

There’s a class war coming to the world of government pensions.

Class war? Gadzooks! Details, please. Details!
"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."
Stew-pendous, eh?

Now follow that up with this looming hanging curve query: "Who should pay for the trillion-dollar pension gap?"

The rest is scrambled eggs, starting with this basic 'numbers please' face-off ;

  • Average annual SS retiree benefit payment? $14k
  • Average Colorado teacher pension payout? Closer to $35k.
And to top that off, as if it alone wasn't enough to bring out the brown shirts: "Many [gray-topped Colorado teachers] also got a 3.5 percent annual raise, no matter what inflation was."

"Got"? Well, see, the Colorado legislature barbered the contracts a bit recently.

Are you interested in capitalizing these backroom deals doled out in the prior 40-50 years or so? Mr Columnist does. Taking the Colorado teachers as a for-instance, our NYC weekend relief pitcher here discovers (at a handy online insurance agency) that a 58-year-old male shopping for an annuity with the same set of outputs would have to hand over a minimum of $860,000! A woman would need at least $928,000, because of her longer life expectancy.

Now I'll do some math myself to break out the $20k increment above average SS payment really involved here, and yikes -- being just an average retiring 58-year-old Colorado public school male teacher is to be worth $500k more today then being an average Mcjobbled jerk of 62-65.

Talk radio can make some damn ugly music out of that, eh?

Sum-up, pinko style:

Teachers get 30 years of second-rate pay in exchange for a first-rate pension. Maybe fair enough, all things considered. But, comes time to collect, and what happens? What else -- the eye-patched slash-and-burn Yahoo demagogues bring out the cutlasses.

We got the makings of a continuing nation-wide saga underway here. Care to bet on the outcome?

Comments (6)

senecal:

What's the point of comparing the two? They're both going to get whacked. Certainly teachers deserve theirs, but the moral calculations are shifting lately, as firemen and policemen, once poor slobs, are now accorded the lustre of military heroes.

FB:

My take is pretty simple: the sooner that all pensions are eliminated, the better. Detach pensions from employers. Increase social security. Admittedly I'm not an expert here though

op, I'd like to see a post on union pension politics. IIRC there was a particularly nasty case here in ontario where the older members of a union supported management in a full offshoring of a factory and firing of all the workers in order to guarantee that their precious pensions would survive via the MNC gravy train.

MJS:

FB -- This seems to be a special case of what has become a very familiar two-tier pattern. The Teamsters love these contracts -- the old dogs get the gravy and the youngsters get the shit. I'm not aware of all the details, though. Maybe pensions have played more of a role than I know about. The younger guys are typically less concerned about their pensions -- it all seems so remote. Comes up on you faster than you expect, though.

op:

fb

i agree
but each one of these struggles allows a venue
that ought not be minimized because they suffer from
serious last stand- itis

i also hesitate to play this as pie card sell out thru splitting the membership
even though i myself once negotiated such a teamster deal ..from the corporate side
and know if only in small
of what mjs speaks
the double breasted paradigm of the late 70's
union barn none union barn
same corporation
was the set up on a grand scale
it over time effectively destroyed the national freight agreement
a master work
that indeed contained truly coast to coast
paralytic capacity

many such stories to retell
between
77 and now

op:

a post on union pension politics

i agree
my common law son in law is the ace on that
i'll ask him

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