[quote=pri_dk][quote=CA renter]You can’t tell me that with the taxes our govt collects, they don’t have enough resources for emergency services. Then where is that money going?[/quote]
Didn’t we already have a long thread that explained this?
The taxes are going to unfunded pensions.
In other words, today’s taxes are paying for the emergency call that happened many years ago.
Back to the OP’s original question: The funds will never last, even in Temeucula, so the success of the plan will come down to the meaning of “semi” retired.[/quote]
Not necessarily. While San Diego has its own pension fund, many (most?) other cities are with CalPERS. At this point in time, none of the cities I’m aware of are “bankrupt” because of losses in the CalPERS fund.
Most cities didn’t even fund the pensions for a number of years because of the “superfunded” status of the retirement funds. This was during the boom times…so where did all that money go? It wasn’t going to the pensions. The unions were trying to push the cities to fund the pensions through the “good times” but the cities refused (much better to spend that money on grand signage and monuments to council members, apparently). So, forgive me if I’m not exactly sympathetic to the whining about union workers and their pensions. Is there room for improvement? Sure there is, but it’s ignorant to just point fingers at the workers and claim that they are the problem. The root of the problem lies much further up the chain — and it includes Wall Street and the financial industry, BTW.
We won’t even get into the back-room deals cities made with land owners, developers and other private entities (often with ties to the decision makers in the city). So much money is siphoned off by these deals, and the taxpayers do not benefit from these deals at all.
