Maggie's Farm

Government pensions "Taxpayers may need to pay twice?" Excuse me? It is interesting and perhaps Barrister could comment in a more learned fashion than I can about how Americans are refining the ability to welsh on contracts and obligations.

Many govt employees, at least local, fund their own pension funds entirely with payroll deductions over 10, 320, 30 or 40 years of service. This is taken out of their paychecks, not matched, ,and merely managed by their employers (whose administrators are often corrupt and paid in soft dollars etc by the substandard firms who get the contracts with the municipality, say) The employee has no say in where the money is run and cannot withdraw it whilst employed. At the end they face the likelihood that the employer will find a way to welsh on the agreemen as to how they pay out the employee's own money.

It is good for anyone to be able to grow savings tax exempt whilst working, and have it be a kind of forced savings (people making 50k or so a year don't have a lot of leeway for exotic investments and are as tempted to buy Lumixes as millionaires). That is why I have done so.

But the prudent people I know are increasingly taking their savings out as a lump sum when they retire or quit the job or are laid off in restructurings. Who in their right mind would trust their own hard-saved cash to a promise of a regular payment when such rabid hysteria talks about workers bankrupting their former employer!!! (Incidentally, the workers who do it are perhaps guilty of not stoking the economy enough: they live in more modest houses, tend to be stably married, attend church, drive old cars, never travel, do not eat out, all in order to fund their savings) to the rich people in the community who think the money is theirs??? Pirates at work and pirates in their home towns. If the investments fail, because stupid administrators didn't just give it to a safer fund like Vanguard, municipalities will face a far worse problem when everyone takes their life savings out and invests it themselves.

I didn't work like a dog (and yes, we lazy governmental employees are mostly now working jobs that used to take 2 or 3 people) and deprive my family (they have never been to Europe tho I grew up there) only to have North American versions of the Somali pirates plan to deprive me of my life's work savings. And don't even get me started on Social Security.

It only feels like 320 (and can't afford new glasses on my lavish salary) so missed typo at first, sorry.