Not all, and they are rarer today, pensions were totally insane back in the day.
One of my mothers friends, who is now in her 80's, has been retired on a pension for over 40 years. She started working for her municipality right out of high school at 18, and worked 25 years as a clerk to get a full pension. Retired at 43(!) with 75% final pay (annually adjusted) and lifelong medical benefits.
Its totally insane and completely unsustainable. Back in the day people usually keeled over at 65 and the US was viewed as having achieved infinite growth forever, so perhaps back then it was a reasonable but generous offer. Today however it's just straight up corruption and waste to offer benefits like that.
My Dad's friend is a retired fire chief, my Dad told me he makes $300K a year in retirement! That is beyond insane as it ends up costing (with a retirement at say 55) about 30 or so years of payments which adds up to $9M for the reminder of his life. This is clearly not sustainable and when you add up social security and 401k it ends up with a kings ransom for a public servant.
What about solidarity? Instead of criticizing another worker’s situation as “insane”, we should be asking: why can’t we also have this kind of retirement package? They’ve successfully pitted worker vs worker.
I don’t think that retired fire chief’s (or school teachers') retirement is what’s wrong: what’s wrong is that most of us will not have a retirement that good. Why is that? It is possible to answer that question without tearing down someone else’s situation.
> Retired at 43(!) with 75% final pay (annually adjusted) and lifelong medical benefits.
I don't think that's insane at all. Sounds pretty reasonable in exchange for taking at least one third of her time for 43 years of her life (and over those years where she was young and most healthy).
Corporations used to offer similar pensions all the time. They started offering them in 1875 and they were extremely successful doing it. 401(k) plans were a scheme to shift the risk and responsibility from the employer to the employees and that change made already wealthy and successful companies a lot richer, but at the expense of making many people work right up until the day they die, or they become too sick to work at which point they become impoverished. The move from pensions to 401(k) plans was bad for the economy, and for local economies in particular.
The only thing I think is crazy about it is the lifelong medical benefits which shouldn't be on the employer at all since everyone should have universal coverage.
My mom has been retired from teaching for over 30 years — and she got a package to retire early.
Weird situation. Shrinking demographics in the 70’s led to layoffs. By their union contract layoffs were done strictly by seniority. Working on a contract that was stepped by seniority, this led to a very top heavy cohort of teachers 20 years later, who were being paid top of the scale. To redistribute the ages of service they offered a limited number of buyouts, which lowered their overall costs and normalize the pipeline.
This was also a legit and reasonably sustainable move as the NY State Teachers fund, is funded at 101% of liabilities.
If your mother's friend's situation actually unsustainable? It sounds like the pension actually has the money, since I'm assuming they're not able to print money (like what is necessary for certain old-age insurance programs). Or do you just mean that it's not sustainable for everyone to have that same situation?
It's not her fault. However, as a taxpayer, I don't want my money to be taken from me (postponing my own retirement) to fund her retirement. And that is absolutely going to happen with insolvent pension funds.
It's not about fault, it's about providing better than you got for your children and grandchildren. If you - and the people compensated with the same equities that fund your pension - are putting substantial downward pressure on earnings for the current generation of laborers and it's having all sorts of knock-on effects, you're failing to provide better for those coming after you.
> perhaps back then it was a reasonable but generous offer.
No, it was a trade. You would accept low pay, very little opportunity for career advancement, and even if you worked hard to advance you were never going to more than double what you were making when you were hired. Also, government jobs are political jobs, are often eliminated on a whim, or you're forced to work unpaid for a while because of a budget vote.
In return, you got a pension. A pension that everyone understood the yield of, and everybody understood about what it was worth. It was entirely sustainable. The problem was and is that invested pension funds become underfunded because if instead of depositing the money, you spend it somewhere else and promise to put it back later, it's basically a low-interest loan. If the budget is tight enough (so credit is probably bad enough) that a state or municipality is considering raiding pensions, then this represents a huge amount of savings. The problem is that you're never going to pay it back.
Another problem is that managing those funds became lucrative for the managers, and for the products that they would steer these institutions into buying, often in exchange for kickbacks or in a complex web of self-dealing: Somehow, the person managing pensions funds for your state has them all invested in products sold by a company his son works for. His son didn't directly profit from the trade, but for some reason makes $500K a year, barely graduated high school, and nobody knows what he actually does there.
That's not the fault of pensions, that's the fault of thieves. What's unsustainable is a government that promises a pension in return for a shitty boring career as a clerk, and then after you retire from sitting in a DMV window for 25 years, takes the pension back. Nobody would accept a government job cheaply then, because the state has ruined its reputation in the same way as if they had defaulted on their bonds.
Nothing wrong if that's how we want to pay government employees: a days work for a days pay. But we got a discount because we didn't pay like that, and if we had, that money would just have been spent at the time, rather than being stolen throughout their retirement. Pretending like pensions were an unreasonable demand or an absurd promise is just laying groundwork to justify stealing from people who worked for a living.
edit: If government jobs were so good, why weren't they in demand? Does supply and demand only break down when we need it to?
1) If pensions are so easily manipulated and stolen from, that's an argument against pensions, not an argument for them.
2) Although the factors you mention are real, they are much smaller than core issue, which is the state underfunding the pension, either explicitly or through unrealistic expectations of return.
3) Even granting that the present government should make sure that pensioners get their full benefits, why should current workers be the ones to bear the burden of past bad decisions by policymakers? You could just as well tax pension payments more highly, and use that revenue to fund the pensions.
> Retired at 43(!) with 75% final pay (annually adjusted) and lifelong medical benefits.
Some go on to another municipal job and get a second pension so they get paid twice as much to do nothing in retirement. I know someone who worked for the USPS then on to the NYC DoE as a janitor in a school. His wife worked for the public school system as well, then went on to work in a catholic school after retirement. Three pensions in one household. They invest a lot into long term investments such as bonds, CD's and the like. I hear they have millions in the bank.
The people who worked those jobs are all sitting pretty right now. I know plenty of people who made out like bandits in various NYC agencies, especially in the DoE. My aunt left her heirs 2.2 million and a house worth a million from her pension money she heavily invested and was still able to travel the world in retirement. She was a secretary in a middle school. Amazing what you can do with tons of free time and money.
I've got people in my family in similar situation. 25 years in an unskilled cushy job was enough to buy a lifetime of cushy retirement. Boomers were basically handed life on a platter.
I always see the words pensions in civic deficit news. I'm early 30s and pensions are a concept that nobody my age or younger will ever benefit from yet is footing the bill for.
You’ve already benefited from them, by getting government services at a lower up front cost by acquiring labor with the promise of them on the backend.
(And, barring those promises not being fulfilled, plenty of people your age and younger have already been working in jobs that qualify them for pensions when they reach a certain age, or have a relative with such a pension with survivorship benefits, and will benefit from them as beneficiaries.)
They're beneficial to younger generations, provided that there's enough value generated by the younger generations to cover the cost of the pension.
The problem is, this new wave of retirees - the Baby Boomers - did not have enough children. Their children's generation - the Millennials - can thus charge more for their labor. The Millennials also aren't having enough children.
This means that the people generating the value are taking more of the value for themselves to live on (though not relative to inflation, but that's a different conversation), and there's fewer of them contributing to pensions through various government revenue schemes.
Also, anecdotally, my parents have far more expensive plans for their retirement than my grandparents ever did.
Are you mad at the pensioners, who worked for decades on the agreement they’d get a pension, or are you mad at the oligarchs and businesses who lobbied to make pensions a thing of the past so that you’re not protected as well?
You should be mad at the Capitalists not the workers.
Patrick Boyle did a segment recently on pensions that I cannot locate. He pointed out that the private industry in the US that granted generous pensions in the mid-20th century all went bankrupt, and that is why there are not private-sector US pensions anymore. It coincided with globalization, but is more a symptom of the countercyclical nature of pension expenses. They cost most when a business can bear the costs least.
This is one of many ways that folks aged 70+ had it much better than folks in the workforce now, and represents generational inequality that you should not minimize or attribute to "capitalists."
You may, if you like, attribute it to "generosity" by individuals indifferent to "math."
It's worth noting that a lot of shares in publicly traded companies are held by retirement and pension funds.
Money paid to a shareholder is money not paid to the person doing the labor and vice-versa.
That's not to say that pension funds are the sole reason that wages haven't kept up with costs over the last 50-ish years, but it doesn't help, particularly when management/the oligarchs are compensated mainly using the same shares that those retirement and pension funds use to generate revenues for the people they cover.
800,000 is also larger than the population of several states, and local cost of labor is a lot higher in SF, driving the cost of pretty much everything other than buying commodity goods a government might do higher.
15 billion is more than the respective budgets of Alabama, Oklahoma, New Mexico, North Dakota, Iowa, West Virginia, Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Vermont, New Hampshire, and South Dakota. Of these, only North Dakota, Wyoming, Alaska, and Vermont have populations lower than 800,000.
Seattle has roughly the same population as San Francisco and roughly the same labor costs, and has an annual budget of $8.3 billion. At some point you have to just face facts that it's gross mismanagement and incompetence.
GDP is just more people spending more money for more expensive things. It's kind of a failed metric for economic productivity unless you think an $8 Big Mac is twice as productive to the economy than a $4 Big Mac.
In my opinion, climate change causing more and more overwhelming* weather events, this issue is going to get worse.
*overwhelming in the sense of responders/budgets/planners unable to mitigate the effects of worse weather.
It's partly why I'm so "doomer" about climate change. The secondary effects of these weather events are already difficult to manage. What happens when we experience mass migration of humanity, or even worse storms?
For example, Kentucky USA has an average year-to-date precipitation of 6 inches. In 2025, that has increased to 12 inches. Yes that's one year, but it only takes one major event to wreak havoc on a poorer town or state.
I just finished the book “On The Move” about the coming climate driven migration and yea, I don’t see any part of the US prepared for being either the source or destination in these problems.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/unlivable-abrahm-lustgarten/199...
Ladies and Gentleman's: cities cost MORE than spread living despite the many PR who state the contrary with ONLY APPARENT logic. Under-utilize large buildings for less than 12h/day commuting between them was needed in the past but it's a nonsense today. Small buildings consume much less raw materials than bigger one for equivalent usable space for humans because we have to sustain the mere structure, with anti-seismic norms, fire safety norms, elevators, ... who cost MUCH. They are inefficient to heat and cool with modern heat-pumps as well. They pollute more.
Cities are nowadays only needed to push 2030 Agenda where the inmates do not own nothing and live consuming anything, no matter how they earn, to be always at zero and such need is not practically sustainable.
Not all, and they are rarer today, pensions were totally insane back in the day.
One of my mothers friends, who is now in her 80's, has been retired on a pension for over 40 years. She started working for her municipality right out of high school at 18, and worked 25 years as a clerk to get a full pension. Retired at 43(!) with 75% final pay (annually adjusted) and lifelong medical benefits.
Its totally insane and completely unsustainable. Back in the day people usually keeled over at 65 and the US was viewed as having achieved infinite growth forever, so perhaps back then it was a reasonable but generous offer. Today however it's just straight up corruption and waste to offer benefits like that.
My Dad's friend is a retired fire chief, my Dad told me he makes $300K a year in retirement! That is beyond insane as it ends up costing (with a retirement at say 55) about 30 or so years of payments which adds up to $9M for the reminder of his life. This is clearly not sustainable and when you add up social security and 401k it ends up with a kings ransom for a public servant.
What about solidarity? Instead of criticizing another worker’s situation as “insane”, we should be asking: why can’t we also have this kind of retirement package? They’ve successfully pitted worker vs worker.
I don’t think that retired fire chief’s (or school teachers') retirement is what’s wrong: what’s wrong is that most of us will not have a retirement that good. Why is that? It is possible to answer that question without tearing down someone else’s situation.
9 replies →
> Retired at 43(!) with 75% final pay (annually adjusted) and lifelong medical benefits.
I don't think that's insane at all. Sounds pretty reasonable in exchange for taking at least one third of her time for 43 years of her life (and over those years where she was young and most healthy).
Corporations used to offer similar pensions all the time. They started offering them in 1875 and they were extremely successful doing it. 401(k) plans were a scheme to shift the risk and responsibility from the employer to the employees and that change made already wealthy and successful companies a lot richer, but at the expense of making many people work right up until the day they die, or they become too sick to work at which point they become impoverished. The move from pensions to 401(k) plans was bad for the economy, and for local economies in particular.
The only thing I think is crazy about it is the lifelong medical benefits which shouldn't be on the employer at all since everyone should have universal coverage.
Just ballparking...
That's ~3.75 million dollars, plus probably another ~$250k benefits from when she turned 18 to today.
So $4 million dollars for 25 years of entry level work.
It works out to roughly paying a secretary at the municipal building $150k/yr to answer the phone? Do data entry? Collect payment for tickets?
You don't think $150k is insane pay for a municipal secretary?
Not only that, but sometimes the municipality hires them back on a consulting basis to get them a paycheck and a pension for the same work.
My mom has been retired from teaching for over 30 years — and she got a package to retire early.
Weird situation. Shrinking demographics in the 70’s led to layoffs. By their union contract layoffs were done strictly by seniority. Working on a contract that was stepped by seniority, this led to a very top heavy cohort of teachers 20 years later, who were being paid top of the scale. To redistribute the ages of service they offered a limited number of buyouts, which lowered their overall costs and normalize the pipeline.
This was also a legit and reasonably sustainable move as the NY State Teachers fund, is funded at 101% of liabilities.
If your mother's friend's situation actually unsustainable? It sounds like the pension actually has the money, since I'm assuming they're not able to print money (like what is necessary for certain old-age insurance programs). Or do you just mean that it's not sustainable for everyone to have that same situation?
It’s not her fault that she lucked out
It's not her fault. However, as a taxpayer, I don't want my money to be taken from me (postponing my own retirement) to fund her retirement. And that is absolutely going to happen with insolvent pension funds.
3 replies →
It's not about fault, it's about providing better than you got for your children and grandchildren. If you - and the people compensated with the same equities that fund your pension - are putting substantial downward pressure on earnings for the current generation of laborers and it's having all sorts of knock-on effects, you're failing to provide better for those coming after you.
9 replies →
Of course not, but that doesn't make it a sustainable practice long term.
> perhaps back then it was a reasonable but generous offer.
No, it was a trade. You would accept low pay, very little opportunity for career advancement, and even if you worked hard to advance you were never going to more than double what you were making when you were hired. Also, government jobs are political jobs, are often eliminated on a whim, or you're forced to work unpaid for a while because of a budget vote.
In return, you got a pension. A pension that everyone understood the yield of, and everybody understood about what it was worth. It was entirely sustainable. The problem was and is that invested pension funds become underfunded because if instead of depositing the money, you spend it somewhere else and promise to put it back later, it's basically a low-interest loan. If the budget is tight enough (so credit is probably bad enough) that a state or municipality is considering raiding pensions, then this represents a huge amount of savings. The problem is that you're never going to pay it back.
Another problem is that managing those funds became lucrative for the managers, and for the products that they would steer these institutions into buying, often in exchange for kickbacks or in a complex web of self-dealing: Somehow, the person managing pensions funds for your state has them all invested in products sold by a company his son works for. His son didn't directly profit from the trade, but for some reason makes $500K a year, barely graduated high school, and nobody knows what he actually does there.
That's not the fault of pensions, that's the fault of thieves. What's unsustainable is a government that promises a pension in return for a shitty boring career as a clerk, and then after you retire from sitting in a DMV window for 25 years, takes the pension back. Nobody would accept a government job cheaply then, because the state has ruined its reputation in the same way as if they had defaulted on their bonds.
Nothing wrong if that's how we want to pay government employees: a days work for a days pay. But we got a discount because we didn't pay like that, and if we had, that money would just have been spent at the time, rather than being stolen throughout their retirement. Pretending like pensions were an unreasonable demand or an absurd promise is just laying groundwork to justify stealing from people who worked for a living.
edit: If government jobs were so good, why weren't they in demand? Does supply and demand only break down when we need it to?
1) If pensions are so easily manipulated and stolen from, that's an argument against pensions, not an argument for them.
2) Although the factors you mention are real, they are much smaller than core issue, which is the state underfunding the pension, either explicitly or through unrealistic expectations of return.
3) Even granting that the present government should make sure that pensioners get their full benefits, why should current workers be the ones to bear the burden of past bad decisions by policymakers? You could just as well tax pension payments more highly, and use that revenue to fund the pensions.
> Retired at 43(!) with 75% final pay (annually adjusted) and lifelong medical benefits.
Some go on to another municipal job and get a second pension so they get paid twice as much to do nothing in retirement. I know someone who worked for the USPS then on to the NYC DoE as a janitor in a school. His wife worked for the public school system as well, then went on to work in a catholic school after retirement. Three pensions in one household. They invest a lot into long term investments such as bonds, CD's and the like. I hear they have millions in the bank.
The people who worked those jobs are all sitting pretty right now. I know plenty of people who made out like bandits in various NYC agencies, especially in the DoE. My aunt left her heirs 2.2 million and a house worth a million from her pension money she heavily invested and was still able to travel the world in retirement. She was a secretary in a middle school. Amazing what you can do with tons of free time and money.
I've got people in my family in similar situation. 25 years in an unskilled cushy job was enough to buy a lifetime of cushy retirement. Boomers were basically handed life on a platter.
[dead]
"No, $400k total comp is entirely reasonable for being able to center the ReactJS divs."
I always see the words pensions in civic deficit news. I'm early 30s and pensions are a concept that nobody my age or younger will ever benefit from yet is footing the bill for.
You’ve already benefited from them, by getting government services at a lower up front cost by acquiring labor with the promise of them on the backend.
(And, barring those promises not being fulfilled, plenty of people your age and younger have already been working in jobs that qualify them for pensions when they reach a certain age, or have a relative with such a pension with survivorship benefits, and will benefit from them as beneficiaries.)
Most of today is the result of stealing from the future, and that strategy is running out of steam.
16 replies →
The person that worked for 25 years starting at 18 for a full pension benefited me? Nah, I think they benefited far far more.
They're beneficial to younger generations, provided that there's enough value generated by the younger generations to cover the cost of the pension.
The problem is, this new wave of retirees - the Baby Boomers - did not have enough children. Their children's generation - the Millennials - can thus charge more for their labor. The Millennials also aren't having enough children.
This means that the people generating the value are taking more of the value for themselves to live on (though not relative to inflation, but that's a different conversation), and there's fewer of them contributing to pensions through various government revenue schemes.
Also, anecdotally, my parents have far more expensive plans for their retirement than my grandparents ever did.
Are you mad at the pensioners, who worked for decades on the agreement they’d get a pension, or are you mad at the oligarchs and businesses who lobbied to make pensions a thing of the past so that you’re not protected as well?
You should be mad at the Capitalists not the workers.
Patrick Boyle did a segment recently on pensions that I cannot locate. He pointed out that the private industry in the US that granted generous pensions in the mid-20th century all went bankrupt, and that is why there are not private-sector US pensions anymore. It coincided with globalization, but is more a symptom of the countercyclical nature of pension expenses. They cost most when a business can bear the costs least.
This is one of many ways that folks aged 70+ had it much better than folks in the workforce now, and represents generational inequality that you should not minimize or attribute to "capitalists."
You may, if you like, attribute it to "generosity" by individuals indifferent to "math."
2 replies →
I think they're mad at a society that promised generous pensions in exchange for lower wages, and then (for various reasons) didn't deliver them.
It's worth noting that a lot of shares in publicly traded companies are held by retirement and pension funds.
Money paid to a shareholder is money not paid to the person doing the labor and vice-versa.
That's not to say that pension funds are the sole reason that wages haven't kept up with costs over the last 50-ish years, but it doesn't help, particularly when management/the oligarchs are compensated mainly using the same shares that those retirement and pension funds use to generate revenues for the people they cover.
San Francisco's budget is around $15 billion, which is larger than that of many states, for a population of around 800,000
800,000 is also larger than the population of several states, and local cost of labor is a lot higher in SF, driving the cost of pretty much everything other than buying commodity goods a government might do higher.
15 billion is more than the respective budgets of Alabama, Oklahoma, New Mexico, North Dakota, Iowa, West Virginia, Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Vermont, New Hampshire, and South Dakota. Of these, only North Dakota, Wyoming, Alaska, and Vermont have populations lower than 800,000.
Seattle has roughly the same population as San Francisco and roughly the same labor costs, and has an annual budget of $8.3 billion. At some point you have to just face facts that it's gross mismanagement and incompetence.
9 replies →
It also has 20x the GDP of Wyoming.
GDP is just more people spending more money for more expensive things. It's kind of a failed metric for economic productivity unless you think an $8 Big Mac is twice as productive to the economy than a $4 Big Mac.
2 replies →
That's 10x the budget of Indianapolis which has a larger population (GDP is around $200B for ref).
What message are you trying to communicate? Are you implying that this is too high? Too low? Poorly spent?
In my opinion, climate change causing more and more overwhelming* weather events, this issue is going to get worse.
*overwhelming in the sense of responders/budgets/planners unable to mitigate the effects of worse weather.
It's partly why I'm so "doomer" about climate change. The secondary effects of these weather events are already difficult to manage. What happens when we experience mass migration of humanity, or even worse storms?
For example, Kentucky USA has an average year-to-date precipitation of 6 inches. In 2025, that has increased to 12 inches. Yes that's one year, but it only takes one major event to wreak havoc on a poorer town or state.
I just finished the book “On The Move” about the coming climate driven migration and yea, I don’t see any part of the US prepared for being either the source or destination in these problems. https://bookshop.org/p/books/unlivable-abrahm-lustgarten/199...
US will need better wall. Something like Maginot Line should do.
4 replies →
Yes, and with the current admin. cutting everything, it will not be pretty.
But except for Police and Fire, I thought pensions were gone for all other City Employees, replaced by a 401k.
Ladies and Gentleman's: cities cost MORE than spread living despite the many PR who state the contrary with ONLY APPARENT logic. Under-utilize large buildings for less than 12h/day commuting between them was needed in the past but it's a nonsense today. Small buildings consume much less raw materials than bigger one for equivalent usable space for humans because we have to sustain the mere structure, with anti-seismic norms, fire safety norms, elevators, ... who cost MUCH. They are inefficient to heat and cool with modern heat-pumps as well. They pollute more.
Cities are nowadays only needed to push 2030 Agenda where the inmates do not own nothing and live consuming anything, no matter how they earn, to be always at zero and such need is not practically sustainable.
That's is. The rest is noise.