[quote=temeculaguy]You are assuming actuarial figures or life expectancy of 78, that’s the rub. Career cops and firemen (not neccesarily cheifs) tend to drop dead within a few years of retirement. Their heirs don’t get anything. Most of the studies i looked at today don’t isolate fire people, they either lump cops and fire together or just study cops.
With all other gov’t employees, the defined benefit thing screws the taxpayer, but in these cases it isn’t such a bad deal except for the shocking numbers. 50% of 30 year plus cops are dead within 5 years of retirement, age 66 was the highest number I could find online and it included a sample size of 660,000. Look at retirement systems other than san diego city because they failed to pay into it for years and did overextend the benefits. S.D. county, pers (state) and others are only hurtng because of the stock market and for a long time the taxpayer made no payments because the cops were not getting much out of them. Where they got out of control was extending those benefits to all the other employees who do live till they are 80, allowing them similar benefits at 55, but they live 20-25 years as retirees, while the coppers shave 15-20 years off their life, not because they are killed at work, but because they are broken by the time they retire. Those same cops and firemen are not eligible for social security and their employers don’t pay into it, they rarely live to collect it and that money is put into their pension, which isn’t all that much more than ss, actually african american men should be allowed a similar exception because their life expectancy is below social security age, they are subsidizing old white women who live forever.
It’s easy to say that they should have a 401k like everyone else, in many cases their family would be better off. Check a pension website, if on the day they retire they are not married and their kids are 18, if they die the next week, the pension fund keeps everything, their ex wives get nothing if they are dead, only if they are alive. If they marry after they retire, that spouse gets nothing, if their kids turn 18 before they die and after retirement, if before they turn 18, nothing once they turn 18, and these survivors get a fraction of their pension, not the whole thing and if the spouse at the time of retirement re-marrys, they are cut off. They tend to not reach retirement with a spouse at their side at the same rates that other employees do. If they quit before they are eligible, they get nothing, which happens more often than not. So if you look at the post above about saving money, it forgets that san diego pay nothing if that captain has a heart attack tomorrow, and the odds are against the cheif as far as living to 78.
With a 401k, that money will get paid out, the current system rolls it over for other retirees. After years of swelling pension funds, they decided to give them more to enjoy the few years they would have, where they got into trouble was they also decided that everyone should share the wealth, and the cubicle workers for all the governemnt branches tend to live forever.
Of course the cheapest pension system for cops in the world has to be china.
average life expectancy for a chinese traffic cop after 20 years on the job is 43. The pension office probably never has to replace it’s pension check printer ink cartridges. if they gave them double their salaries as retirees, the taxpayer would actually win.
Another aside, those cheifs, both fire and police are not union folk, they aren’t even protected by civil service, they are appointed or elected and their compensation is at the discretion of their political bosses and they can be removed, but I’m off track, I did not intend to defend them, just the men and women that are working right now, while I am comfortably enjoying my wine and enjoying my freedom, while they are not. There are also some soldiers working in some far away place, I owe them too. As soon as my tax money stops paying people to have 9 kids or watch jerry spinger and sit on the couch or bail out their greedy real estate investment, or AIG (they cost us far more than taking care of our brave) then and only then am i willing to discuss taking things away from the only tax recipients that i approve of.[/quote]
Amen!
——————-
Researchers found firefighters have a 100-percent higher risk of developing testicular cancer, a 50-
percent higher risk for multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and for prostate cancer it’s a
28-percent increased risk, compared with nonfirefighters.
BTW, no freakin’ way anyone can claim that a private sector employee is more responsible/liable than a public sector employee. In the private sector, the worst that can happen is you get fired. In the public sector, if you screw up, your face might be plastered across the newspapers with all the details of your mistakes, and if you’re a cop, there’s the risk that you can go to jail simply for defending yourself against a dangerous criminal with a rap sheet a mile long. If there’s a public outcry, you can kiss the rest of your life (and the life of your family) goodbye.
Public employees in responsible positions (cops, firefighters, teachers) are often told to carry an umbrella policy, in the event of a lawsuit, because they can be held personally liable for very expensive “mistakes” — BIG lawsuits which are rarely, if ever, seen in the private sector for similarly-compensated positions.
Government workers are much bigger targets for scammers because people perceive them (their employers) to have deep pockets. For this reason, public employees in responsible positions are kept on a much tighter leash, and are often fired if they do not perform or if they are perceived to be a liability to the employer. The myth that public employees don’t get fired is totally false. People use a rare example from the news media to make a point, when the vast majority of public employees who commit the same offense would have been fired.
I’ve worked in both private and public sectors, and can say for a fact that the public sector has much higher standards for their employees than the private sector does. They require a higher level of education and experience, and public sector employees are much more closely scrutinized than their private sector counterparts.
If any of the complainers think these employees are overpaid and underworked, by all means…step up to the plate.
What’s funny is that police and fire departments couldn’t find enough qualified candidates during the boom times. Now that the some loser — who’s fresh out of high school — can’t make $80K/month as a mortgage broker, people turn on the public sector employees.
The nature of these jobs (very specialized training that cannot be transferred from jobs outside of these sectors), and the costs required to recruit and train new employees, means the govt employers cannot afford a high turnover rate. They need people who will stay there through the ups and downs of the economic cycles. That means they’ll appear underpaid during the good times, and overpaid during the bad times.
BTW, how much is it worth **to you** to have well-trained, experienced law enforcement/safety personnel show up within minutes of your calling 911? When the difference between life or death for you (or your child, spouse, etc.) is determined by the timeliness and quality of care given, how much is it worth to you?
