While you are cringing, local police/fire men/women, and many other municipal workers are retiring at 45-55 and will collect a hefty chunk of their top annual earnings, for the rest of their lives. And you're paying for it.

Good for them that they have pensions. The problem is that most workers don't have pensions anymore, not that pensions are bad. 401k's are a terrible retirement strategy for folks that are not pulling in serious money.

The median 401k balance at retirement (65 or over) is $87k.

Really? They’re bankrupting a lot of small and midsize cities by lobbying for increases in pensions that the funding structures can’t bare. The police engage in illegal work slow downs when they don’t get them or reformers get elected, and regular tax payers are stuck with the bill and degrades services.

> 401k's are a terrible retirement strategy for folks that are not pulling in serious money.

Plugging samples into any 401k calculator seems to disagree here: even folks making twenty dollars an hour would have a few hundred thousand dollars by retirement age if they squirreled away the recommended 5-10% of their salary.

One could make the case that workers aren't able to save that much, but either way it seems pretty clear that the issue is that for one reason or another people aren't saving enough.

This seems like looking at the obesity epidemic and saying "Exercise is a terrible strategy for most people, the average retirement BMI is 25" -- the strategy itself is fine, people just aren't executing it (for whatever reason)

I suspect your reading comprehension is poor. The poster above me was saying he "cringes" at pensions, I was demonstrating that they are quite generous and likely far superior, from the perspective of the retiree, than what a 401-k will provide.

And how many private companies could afford to be as generous as the government who can basically raise taxes without anyone being able to do anything about it?

Reconsider yours when I'm not actually disagreeing with you.

And surprisingly enough, old people aren’t dying on the streets for the most part. There is still social security.

Believe it or not, retiring at 40 like police officers or making nearly 400k a year as an LA lifeguard [1] wouldn’t scale to the general population.

These folks are public sector rent seekers and it won’t be the good times forever.

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/27/top...

And I can start on another rant about how cities should completely phase out pensions and put them on the same 401K type plans as everyone else.

It will force more honesty in the negotiation process instead of letting politicians and unions kick the can down the road.

Also let’s take away pensions and healthcare from Congress politicians so they can enjoy the “ freedom” they are preaching for the rest of us. Also take away military pensions and VA.

I’m all for taking away military pensions too. But for a different reason. They can leave anytime and still get some benefits.

They’ll simply demand higher wages to compare to private sector rates. This is not a static situation.

I have no problem with them asking for higher wages. At least that means todays money will have to pay for today’s wages and since most cities and states have to have a balanced budget they can’t put debt obligations on tomorrows taxpayers

But then again what are policemen and firemen going to do? How do there skills help them in the private industry?

They become chief of security, or safety, at factories, office towers, stadiums, casinos, malls, etc

There are a lot more police than there are those positions.

Those places aren’t paying salaries competitive with public sector salaries

- malls are dying - offices are seeing more vacancies - casinos are only in a couple of states