General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I gotta rant on the pension cuts in the funding bill, it made my 77 year old mom cry! [View all]SheilaT
(23,156 posts)I find it a bit scary that after 30 years he only got $1,100/month. Even though that's practically a fortune compared to fifty bucks, it still sounds like not very much after all those years.
Some decades ago I worked ten years for one of the predecessors of USAir, and they were one of the many companies who got out from under their pension obligations. I recently came across some old statements from them and realized that my pension (which I only started taking a year or so ago) was cut by two-thirds. Luckily for me I never counted on that sum to be important in my retirement, but plenty of others did, especially the co-workers I started with who spent their entire working lives at the company.
And now municipal employees are having their pensions greatly reduced. It's relatively easy to get the taxpayers stirred up about the generous pensions teachers, firefighters, and policemen get, since that money comes from taxpayer dollars. Except that all pensions, be they private or public, are promises made. It doesn't matter if a person's paycheck and then pension comes from tax dollars or not. What's happened is that they've been either systematically underfunded, or the money looted for other things.
Meanwhile, the managers of the companies get huge sums of money both while working and when they retire, and the politicians vote themselves very generous pensions and health care.
I'm old enough to remember the generation who didn't have Social Security. My grandparents, for instance. They wound up living with children in their old age, and fortunately for them that worked out okay. We are very quickly getting back to that Golden Age.
I'm not being ironic or sarcastic, just truthful and somewhat bitter here.