I have always been very supportive of “public servants”. Teachers, firefighters, the military, cops, and even elected officials, but within these last few years, as I approached retirement I have noted there is a sinister, self-serving motive in a segment of that population. A segment that has figured out how to work the system to lower their risk of exposure and feather their nests. Not nice. At one time, it was a trade-off; you accepted a lower salary, knowing you were going to be on the job for fewer years than your private sector counterparts, but then reap the reward of a healthy pension and healthcare for the rest of your life. Those days are over. Although the pensions have been reduced to percentages of your highest earning years….another scam whereby the pension is based on two or three consecutive years of averaged earnings, resulting in cops and firefighters socking in a couple of years of overtime to bump their salaries into, in the case of NYC firefighters as much as $225K or more, to qualify for 50 to 75 percent of that doled out by the taxpayers for the rest of their lives. This is why the NYC fire department saw a rash of retirements shortly after 9/11, when overtime spiked in the wake of the disaster. Currently, after 20 years on the job, they are entitled to 50%, with an increase of 1% every 6 months thereafter, up to a maximum of 75%. And to think that at one time, “tier one” workers retired at 100% of their salary. Not a bad deal. At one time, the defense of that spending was that the plan was self-funded… but that is no longer the case, with exorbitant payouts exhausting returns on investment and, with longer lifespans, more retirees than employees. Not exactly an economically sustainable system. Of course, the argument is that many of these cops and firefighters risked their lives in service to the public. Acknowledged. But many sat in administrative positions where the biggest danger was a paper cut. And like every government organization, they tend to be top-heavy with too many redundant administrative positions. And certain jurisdictions have policing and firefighting duties that carry more risk than others. Some suburban firefighters may have a ladder truck but serve a town with no structures over two stories. Similarly, comparing policing a densely populated urban area to a sleepy suburban enclave is impossible. My point is that not all police and firefighter jobs carry the same risk or commitment. Yet, a savvy government employee can effectively work the system, or by virtue of luck alone, reap benefits seemingly disproportionate to their service. And this becomes glaringly apparent when government jobs are compared to similar jobs in the private sector. At one time, the aforementioned lower salaries of government employees were a sacrifice for retirement perks. That has not been the case for years. Private-sector jobs have fallen behind comparable government jobs in compensation. If one uses the 4% withdrawal rule for retirement, a private-sector worker would need to accumulate $3 million in their pension plan to withdraw a salary of $ 120,000 a year, and that doesn’t include healthcare benefits beyond Medicare. And that’s including a career with a likely retirement age of 65 or more. Currently, the retirement age stands at 66 and 9 months. A government employee with 32 years on the job needs only a maximum salary of $160K to achieve the same $120K salary in retirement, including additional healthcare benefits. Three consecutive years averaging a $240K salary would yield the same $120K return after just 10 years on the job, potentially allowing for an early 40s retirement and a second career. Even the military has seen similar bloat, with the ratio of brass to enlisted men increasing exponentially. More Pentagon pencil pushers and administrative brass only result in comfortable positions stateside, riding their armchairs to retirement pensions without ever risking deployment to a war zone. Recent VP candidate Tim Walz is a perfect example of how his years of reserve duty, collecting a salary and posing as a soldier, were cut short when he abruptly resigned after his unit was threatened with deployment. His seriousness and military preparedness were aptly demonstrated when he was unable to competently load his shotgun during a publicity stunt to pander to rural voters by posing as a hunter. And yes, he still collects a military pension for his….ahem….service. But nothing compares to our bloated public education system, where the teachers' union has gamed the system for maximum rewards. Teachers achieve “tenure” after four years on the job and are rewarded with job security, totally independent of performance. The constant addition of fabricated resource days, superintendent days, and conferences, along with the inclusion of minority holidays such as the Chinese Lunar New Year and Diwali as days off in the school year, results in our children spending only 180 days a year in the classroom. And we wonder why our test scores are abysmal. Once again, the public school system is top-heavy, most glaringly at the college level, where bloated budgets and absurd progressive policies result in more DEI officers on campus than professors in the history department. School lunch programs and after-school babysitting services, along with the expansion of school campuses to include state-of-the-art weight rooms and swimming pools, in addition to hordes of administrators, result in swollen budgets that increase the expenditure per student, when the fact remains that there is no correlation between the amount spent per student and academic achievement. A case in point: when a resident of a wealthy lakeside community questioned why his next-door neighbor had an expensive home, drove expensive cars, yet always seemed to be home tending to his lawn early in the afternoon, he came to discover that he was the superintendent of schools with a $250K salary. Apparently commonplace in large school districts and tony suburban enclaves. With little to no oversight. Once again, not a bad deal. For the superintendent, not so much for the taxpayers. We value the service provided by our public sector workers and agree they should be rewarded for it. But when the taxpayer’s return on investment is diminished and we become a piggy bank, when public workers unions negotiate exorbitant retirement packages and benefits far in excess of what a comparable worker can achieve in the private sector, when our taxes are escalating out of control to feed the voracious beast that is government, then perhaps it is time that we reexamine our pact with those who purport to serve us.
