Enjoy your retirement, just don’t ask me to bail it out
In a couple years I’ll mark an auspicious event…. my 30 year mark from joining the US Army. That date always seemed “forever” away, but here it is almost upon me.
To a certain extent it simply marks my aging, but I also gauge my finances against it as well because if I had stayed in, I’d be able to retire with a very livable pension and health insurance for life.
It seems right to me that jobs that are stressful and risky take care of people who stuck it out the full duration. I’ve no problem with police & military getting arrangements where the pension benefit can easily outlast the actual service.
But such a deal makes no sense to me for auto workers, city bureaucrats, or others who really are just working like the rest of us.
In the case of government workers, I’d like to stop such arrangements. Let them do 30 years for the government, save money, retire off their savings, or continue adding to them by staying on the job or going to another that interests them more. You know, like the rest of us.
In the case of auto workers, or any private worker that arranged a sweet deal with their employer, well good on you. But DON’T EXPECT ME TO bail it out.
And that is the crux of the issue with General Motors. They want me to work a few years longer to support deals they made privately with their workers that they can no longer sustain and compete successfully.
Not my problem. It only becomes my problem, my risk, because these workers have the attention of the Democratic Party, a party not known to be shy about reaching into my pockets to help their constituents.
As with the “stimulus” package, the car company and mortgage defaultee bailouts are NOT about economic growth, but about constituency protection.
February 19th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Don’t forget that all the military retirees’ deferred government compensation is taxed out the gazoo too. E-7 retires with two college age kids and gets a job to afford his house and their expenses putting him in the top 25% bracket. Whammo! You can meet his wife at Walmart smiling at the door for $160/week less all the witholding.
February 19th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
You seem to suggest that “city bureaucrats” are all of small and equal value, and that a good compensation package is not necessary to attract the kind of employees the city wants. Then after you lowball the compensation and attract only the dregs of the labor pool, will you complain about how bad city employees are? Hire bad, get bad! Although I don’t know the compensation packages for whichever “city bureaucrats” you refer to, I do know that the compensation package for federal employees is designed to offer security, pension, and certain other benefits as an incentive to attract good employees who will stay with the government as they acquire skills and judgment that could be useful in the private sector. There is a difference between a small government and a cheap government. I presume you do not run your business on the basis of using the cheapest employees, and that you use attractive benefits to attract and keep the kind of talent you want.
February 20th, 2009 at 10:13 am
No what I suggest is that I’m willing to bail out military and police benefits but not others.
I don’t think city hiring is done on merit. I don’t think you do either.
February 20th, 2009 at 10:17 am
More precisely, I’m happy to bail out pensions that were earned (primarily military & police), not public service ones that were politically driven. And never private ones.
February 20th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
Sounds like you are having great fun designing a political world that seems to be completely independent from American representative democracy. Public policy on pensions had its last re-design in the mid-1970s with ERISA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Retirement_Income_Security_Act and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation http://www.pbgc.gov/ . Federal civilian pensions were re-designed in the early 1980s. But one of the basics of our system is that a promise that one Congress makes is a promise that future Congresses keep. If a situation goes beyond those institutions, Congress enacts appropriate news laws, a Congress of representatives elected by the voters to do what the voters want. Any “ideal” structures that the voters don’t want will remain ideal until the idealists convince the voters otherwise. The last two federal elections installed a Congress that has different ideas than what you find the “ideal” approach. As soon as you elect your ideal Congress, you can get your ideal solutions into law.
February 20th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
None of this means I should cover GM’s bogus deals.
The ONLY thing going on here is theft by politics.