I forget who it was earlier in the thread, but they said they didn’t see their teacher friends living lavishly. Lavish doesn’t mean that they buy a Mercedes Benz and move into a mansion. But getting $50k/year at age 50 for sitting around on your butt is lavish to me. I know that my retirement accounts won’t be anywhere near that at age 50. I’ll have to work for a while.
And CAR, you said that private benefits need to be brought up to public benefit levels…there is a problem with that. I do alot of investing, and frequently look at balance sheets of companies. Many companies would have to raise the prices of their goods in order to pay pensions like that, hurting the lower and middle classes. Look at Ford…we did an investment presentation on that company. Most of their income goes to funding their pensions. We called it a pension company that makes cars. Nonetheless, we did not invest in it.
There are record profits, not because the sales numbers are going up, but because there was expense cuts…layoffs. People are spending much less than before, but the fewer employees leads to better margins.
My counter proposal to your proposal is:
1) Get rid of all pensions for anyone under 40.
2) Pay all public employees the same as private employees (which means to bring up their current wages, which they can do because money is no longer being diverted to pensions).
3) Everyone is responsible for their own savings and retirement…and investing, if they dare.
4) Cut taxes equally for everyone so that we all keep more of what we earn. Yes, in a equitible society, this also means for the rich, who are in the (in CA) 44.5% tax bracket.
Then you can do an apples to apples comparison, because nobody is relying on a company to fund their living from age 50 onwards.
