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.
