This is facially false. No one eligible for a public sector pension is well off. 130% of nothing is still nothing.
As I mentioned in a nearby post, the average public sector pension was $3,771 per month for 30 years of service. Maybe to you that's "nothing", but to many people that's a very decent supplement to IRAs, savings, and Social Security.
I can't believe the straw man you're creating. No, the average Joe isn't entitled to live in "rich neighborhoods" alongside "professional athletes". And most "doctors" did 8+ years of additional education and training after college. You resent that they are getting paid for that?
> the average public sector pension was $3,771 per month for 30 years of service.
It would be better to quote the rest of the context [1]:
As organized labor groups were quick to point out on
social media this weekend, normal benefits are much
lower. Out of some 136,000 retirees receiving PERS
benefits, only 2,000 or so collect more than
$100,000 a year.
The average monthly benefit for public employees who
retired in 2015 was $2,692, or about $32,300 annually.
That includes all retires that year, whether they
worked five years or 35. For career employees, with
30 years of service, the average monthly benefit was
$3,771, or $45,252 annually. The Oregonian/OregonLive
maintains an online database of public employee
pensions.
In fairness, OP does have a point here, so I apologize:
Along with the guaranteed rate of return for older
members' pension accounts, and the decision by a
PERS Board packed with public employees to credit
most of the system's bull-market earnings to
employee accounts for two decades ending in 1999,
the money match formula inflated pensions for a
large cohort of public employees.
You could also take a look at the reason for some of PERS' issues, and you'd discover that it's the "money match" formula [2], which wasn't always beneficial for pensioners. You'd also discover that the pension was set up in the 40s, and has since undergone a lot of changes to accommodate different market conditions (as recently as 2003), and it's likely that it will continue to.
But I wouldn't say that Oregon teachers are "enriching" themselves. We're talking about pensions that ended up paying 100% of salary. That's not bananas; most advice is save for 75% taking inflation into account. But I also think pensions are weirdly complicated for probably political reasons. It seems to me a benefits cap at 50% makes complete sense (considering Social Security and other retirement income vehicles)?
(OP quotes 130%, and the source is a YouTube video via Wikipedia posted by the president of ECONorthwest. The video is clear and feels unbiased--in fact ECONorthwest is an economics consulting firm so it's in their interest to be analytical--but the 130% number is assuming Social Security accounts for 30% of salary [5]).
I'm not at all saying everyone's entitled to be rich. OP made the claim Oregon teachers enriched themselves via public sector pensions, and as I interpret the word "enrich" to mean "become rich", I presumed their argument was Oregon teachers can live like rich people on public sector pensions. This is, as we've both pointed out, not true, even though it seems there have been some shenanigans in how the pension is managed.
There are a lot of "social safety net" politics swirling around pension policy debates, and I guess my points are generally:
- A lot of public sector employees don't even get pensions
- Average pension payments are low
- There are sometimes outrageous abuses
- There should probably be a cap on benefits
- Beneficiaries shouldn't be allowed to manage the fund
- Pensions in general are a good idea
- But it would be better if we just expanded Social Security and removed the taxable earnings cap
As I mentioned in a nearby post, the average public sector pension was $3,771 per month for 30 years of service. Maybe to you that's "nothing", but to many people that's a very decent supplement to IRAs, savings, and Social Security.
I can't believe the straw man you're creating. No, the average Joe isn't entitled to live in "rich neighborhoods" alongside "professional athletes". And most "doctors" did 8+ years of additional education and training after college. You resent that they are getting paid for that?