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Should retired government workers get SS

should you get gov retirement and SS

  • yes you deserve both

    Votes: 28 80.0%
  • No, get only your cushy gov retirement.

    Votes: 7 20.0%

  • Total voters
    35
My experience in the private sector is that some workers are getting richly rewarded for poor quality and quantity of work. Here is an example: To enter, cross the threshold, into a very high level engineering position where I worked you were required, among other things, to write a paper on leading edge engineering you were working on. It was best if the paper described technical stuff that no one else was aware of. One of my tasks was to review some of these papers that were in my area of expertise. One paper was beyond what I thought an applicant was capable of. With some research I found that it had been plagiarized from two other papers in a related field. I documented my findings. The result was that I was in trouble because he was a member of the correct church in the section he worked in. He was allowed to ‘edit’ the paper and the paper was accepted. I did a bit of research and found that in general he was not capable of doing the job he was being paid for, forget the promotion he got. My experience in the public sector (e.g. At the S.S. offices which we have been to many times because of relatives.) has been that the people we get assistance from there are very busy. When our issues are complex we ask for the ‘expert’ and actually get one after a wait. There are queues because they are overloaded, not because they are taking extended breaks. When some research has to be done and we need to come back days later we are remembered and answers and choices are presented.
btw, where were you wounded?[/SIZE]


In the wallet!
 
Second time asking for a link for your claims.
Well, at least you couldn't have simply googled that one. The source itself is a Senate Finance Committee staff report from 2002 that is no longer on the internet. You can however still see those numbers referenced in the opening statement of Chairman Baucus at an October 2002 hearing on the strength of Social Security. The transcript of that hearing can be found here.
 
Obama earns an annual $400K plus a $50K expense account for business related costs. The 100th highest paid private sector CEO would make about 40 times that. Something is definitely out of whack here.

Agreed. Obama is grossly overpaid for the quality (and quantity) of his work.
 
Consumers have choice. Taxpayers do not. Benefit packages, severance, bonuses and salaries are limited by profits in the private sector. In the public sector, there's this bottomless well called "taxes" to draw from.
LOL! That certainly does explain why the 100th highest paid CEO only makes 40 times what the President of the United States does. It's all those private sector profit-constraints holding the CEOs back!

Meanwhile, consumer choice is quite often an illusion in a corporate oligarchy. The freedom to choose between paying $3.75/gallon at an Exxon station or $3.75/gallon at a Shell station is not really freedom of choice.
 
My brother in law just retired from a cushy gov job where he made 90K per year and openly bragged about how he spent most of the day shooting the breeze with other gov workers or reading books. He is now getting 70% of his pay and social security. It seems to me he is double dipping, getting a very generous retirement plan and SS. IMO if you are getting a tax payer funded retirement you are getting enough and should not get SS too.

It depends. if you were a federal worker covered by the old Civil Service Retirement System and retired you do not draw SS. You never paid into it as a federal worker. FERS employess pay into SS and it is part of the retirement package created by Congress in 1987.

"Congress created the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) in 1986, and it became effective on January 1, 1987. Since that time, new Federal civilian employees who have retirement coverage are covered by FERS.

FERS is a retirement plan that provides benefits from three different sources: a Basic Benefit Plan, Social Security and the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). Two of the three parts of FERS (Social Security and the TSP) can go with you to your next job if you leave the Federal Government before retirement. The Basic Benefit and Social Security parts of FERS require you to pay your share each pay period. Your agency withholds the cost of the Basic Benefit and Social Security from your pay as payroll deductions. Your agency pays its part too. Then, after you retire, you receive annuity payments each month for the rest of your life.

The TSP part of FERS is an account that your agency automatically sets up for you. Each pay period your agency deposits into your account amount equal to 1% of the basic pay you earn for the pay period. You can also make your own contributions to your TSP account and your agency will also make a matching contribution. These contributions are tax-deferred. The Thrift Savings Plan is administered by the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board."

FERS Information


also , unless your brother in law produced the paperwork for you to see I doubt he is drawing 70% as retirement. He would have to have worked 40+years to even come close.

on a side note I am a retired federal employee. Your brother in law should be ashamed if in fact he sat around and shooting the breeze instead of working. Guess I was brough up differnt. Days work for a days pay. People like him should be fired.
 
My brother in law just retired from a cushy gov job where he made 90K per year and openly bragged about how he spent most of the day shooting the breeze with other gov workers or reading books. He is now getting 70% of his pay and social security. It seems to me he is double dipping, getting a very generous retirement plan and SS. IMO if you are getting a tax payer funded retirement you are getting enough and should not get SS too.

Not all government workers get such high salaries, or "cushy" retirement packages.
 
It depends. if you were a federal worker covered by the old Civil Service Retirement System and retired you do not draw SS. You never paid into it as a federal worker. FERS employess pay into SS and it is part of the retirement package created by Congress in 1987.

"Congress created the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) in 1986, and it became effective on January 1, 1987. Since that time, new Federal civilian employees who have retirement coverage are covered by FERS.

FERS is a retirement plan that provides benefits from three different sources: a Basic Benefit Plan, Social Security and the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). Two of the three parts of FERS (Social Security and the TSP) can go with you to your next job if you leave the Federal Government before retirement. The Basic Benefit and Social Security parts of FERS require you to pay your share each pay period. Your agency withholds the cost of the Basic Benefit and Social Security from your pay as payroll deductions. Your agency pays its part too. Then, after you retire, you receive annuity payments each month for the rest of your life.

The TSP part of FERS is an account that your agency automatically sets up for you. Each pay period your agency deposits into your account amount equal to 1% of the basic pay you earn for the pay period. You can also make your own contributions to your TSP account and your agency will also make a matching contribution. These contributions are tax-deferred. The Thrift Savings Plan is administered by the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board."

FERS Information


also , unless your brother in law produced the paperwork for you to see I doubt he is drawing 70% as retirement. He would have to have worked 40+years to even come close.

on a side note I am a retired federal employee. Your brother in law should be ashamed if in fact he sat around and shooting the breeze instead of working. Guess I was brough up differnt. Days work for a days pay. People like him should be fired.

Just going by what I was told. He is still on the health care plan too. My wife just said he gets a $3700 a month check so he may be counting his other benefits with that, still damn nice retirement.
 
I didn't call it a Ponzi scheme. It's a pyramid scheme.
It's neither one. It's an insurance scheme. Just like GEICO or Progressive, but in a different market. The post that you replied to was with respect to Ponzi schemes. Your post did nothing to change that focus.

So if the working population is reduced, such as it is now, there are fewer people funding that pyramid, but the payouts continue to go up. What happens when it inverts? It crashes......
Come on. Even the ridiculously pessimistic SS Trustees do not project that the system will ever invert/crash/collapse or any other cornball word you want to come up with. The Great Calamity that they foretell is that in 20-25 years, the SS Trust Fund will be exhausted (just as it was always intended to be), and the system will then be able to pay only 75% of scheduled benefits in perpetuity instead of 100% of scheduled benefits in perpetuity. Excpet that because of the way benefits are calculated, 75% of benefits then will be worth just about what 100% of scheduled benefits are worth today. Do you think that ranks up there with say, a major comet-impact? Well, it's just about as likely as well.

And consider if you will that the worker-to-beneficiary ratio was 16.5-to-1 in 1950 and then plummeted to 5.1-to-1 by 1960. Why didn't SS shrivel up and die back then? By the 1970's, it ws down to 3.2-to-1, and thanks to the Great Bush Recession's recent erasure of ten million workers, it is down to 2.8-to-1 today. The SS Trustees think it will get to around 2.0 by 2040 and then simply stay there for 50 years. Is that what you are afraid of? And why are you only worried about retirees? Workers have other dependents to support as well. Such as children. With US birth rates hitting record lows again in 2011, what would you guess is happening to the worker-to-dependent ratio?
 
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on a side note I am a retired federal employee. Your brother in law should be ashamed if in fact he sat around and shooting the breeze instead of working. Guess I was brough up differnt. Days work for a days pay. People like him should be fired.

I am also a retired federal employee. When I first started, my manager made a point of telling me that there is nothing in government that can't wait until tomorrow. Thereafter I had numerous occasions to observe people industriously and conscientiously working away at jobs which should never have been assigned - the equivalent of digging a hole in the morning and filling it up in the afternoon. Others who had ideas for becoming more productive could never get a hearing. And there was a core of competent people who made it their business to serve the public because they believed in what they were doing.

It is extremely difficult to fire an incompetent federal employee. It will take a large chunk of the supervisor's time for most of a year because he/she has to prove to a review board that said employee has received every chance at remedial education, counseling, reassignment, you name it - and it still hasn't worked. However there is a good reason for this, because federal managers can be just as petty and mean as anyone you have ever met. The practical solution is known as the Turkey Farm: a poor manager is put in charge of poor employees and the office is assigned to produce useless reports and meaningless appreciations until they retire.
 
My brother in law just retired from a cushy gov job where he made 90K per year and openly bragged about how he spent most of the day shooting the breeze with other gov workers or reading books. He is now getting 70% of his pay and social security. It seems to me he is double dipping, getting a very generous retirement plan and SS. IMO if you are getting a tax payer funded retirement you are getting enough and should not get SS too.

Did your brother-in-law work for the state of California?

I just discovered recently that I wasted my entire career. Instead of going to college, I should have hitchhiked to California right after high school and got a job as a billboard inspector. After 30 years at an absolute nothing job, I could have retired 20 years ago and be drawing $100,000/year retirement. Plus full medical coverage for life.
 
Raise the ceiling how? By requiring everybody to contribute more, or let people elect to do so?
We do have a voluntary tax system, but not in that sense of the word.

Meanwhile, when the wage cap was indexed by Reagan back in 1983, 90% of all earnings were below the cap. Thanks to all that income redistribution that Republicans have been doing since, only about 82% of earnings are below the cap today. We could offset that sort of tax drain by raising the wage cap to something like $175K rather than the current $113,700. That all by itself would wipe out about 40% of the projected 75-year SS shortfall. If we simply did away with wage cap altogether (as was done for Medicare taxes in 1983), SSTF would never run out of money. There are many other options as well of course.
 
You are kidding me, right? The Federal Salary Council is made up of seven people -- five of which are the heads of Federal unions. Pulleeze.
LOL! Do you think it was the Salary Council who did all that painstaking research and analysis? By law, that's done jointly by swarms of actual experts at OPM and BLS. Maybe it's time for another concession here.

I concede nothing.
In fact, you have already conceded that just because a plan is a defined-benefit plan, it need not actually be the most generous plan on the planet. You had earlier made such a claim, but have since noted that it wasn't actually true. That's called a CONCESSION.
 
Very true. Defined benefit plans used to be the norm, but inflation eventually made them worthless:
Well, the ones without a COLA. Didn't used to matter so much, but the oil price shocks of the early 1970's put inflation risk on the map. That why a COLA was added to SS. Still, inflation risk is another one that employers want to dump off onto employees if they haven't done so already. It should start to dawn on people at some point that the actual "takers" in this economy are not the ones that Romney was pointing to. They are the ones that OWS was pointing to.

Creative accounting has protected the government retirement plans for many years, but we are seeing the beginning of a tidal wave of local government bankruptcies which should, when realistically faced, end the defined benefit plans even in government.
Well, plain old regular accounting plus plain old common sense rules about not moving pension funds through mergers, hostile takeovers, and leveraged buyouts in ways that turned them into stock-price-boosting cash on hand.

And what percentage of how many municipal bankrupticies will you claim to have resulted from cushy employeee pension plans rather than from having been sold down the river by the very same bunch of fraudulent financial sheisters who engineered the 2007 credit crisis?
 
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You don't have to buy things, you have a choice. taxes are paid or you go to jail, big difference.
Give it a rest. Even survivalists buy things. Just ask Kristoffer Clausen.
 
also , unless your brother in law produced the paperwork for you to see I doubt he is drawing 70% as retirement. He would have to have worked 40+years to even come close.
Not actually. As a CSRS employee, you can retire with no penalty at age 55 with 30 years of service. At that point your pension is 56.25% of the average of your three highest years of salary. The percentage increases by 2% per year for each year you continue to work after that. You would need just 14% to reach 70% which is seven more years on top of 30, for a total of 37 years. Still a pretty long time. You can't go any higher than 80% of the average high three, so after 42 years of service, you're just stuck there.

on a side note I am a retired federal employee. Your brother in law should be ashamed if in fact he sat around and shooting the breeze instead of working. Guess I was brough up differnt. Days work for a days pay. People like him should be fired.
Often they either are fired or the incredible wisdom of resigning is pointed out to them. Nobody loves a lummox.
 
Just going by what I was told. He is still on the health care plan too.
You can take both your health and life insurance coverage into retirement. You of course have to continue paying for them. Same with dental, vision, and long-term care policies if you have any of those.
 
I am also a retired federal employee. When I first started, my manager made a point of telling me that there is nothing in government that can't wait until tomorrow.
Hmmm. How did HIS career work out? Otherwise what I'm hearing here is some more good old DMV and fish stories.
 
My brother in law just retired from a cushy gov job where he made 90K per year and openly bragged about how he spent most of the day shooting the breeze with other gov workers or reading books. He is now getting 70% of his pay and social security. It seems to me he is double dipping, getting a very generous retirement plan and SS. IMO if you are getting a tax payer funded retirement you are getting enough and should not get SS too.

If you paid into it you should get it.....Sounds like you are a little jealous to me.
 
So when a person's contributions go to pay for someone else's withdrawl, and the workforce grows and more contributions are made to support those who came before them, what would YOU call it?

Social Security or financially stable
 
If you paid into it you should get it.....Sounds like you are a little jealous to me.

Not jealous, resentful is a better word. I resent that I paid for him to do virtually nothing for 25 years and now I will pay for his cushy gov retirement package. This kind of crap is breaking this country.
 
Not jealous, resentful is a better word. I resent that I paid for him to do virtually nothing for 25 years and now I will pay for his cushy gov retirement package. This kind of crap is breaking this country.

Resentful and jealous are synonyms
 
Resentful and jealous are synonyms

To me jealous means at some level you would like to be the person you are jealous of and I would not trade places with this guy for any amount of money. Lets look at our two lives and compare results as a commentary on the state of this nation. I worked hard and produced for this country and at one point even employed people. I have my SS coming to live on along with what I managed to squirrel away in a 401K and IRA's. I can retire comfortably but really need the SS to make ends meet. The government worker kicked back most of his life doing virtually nothing and contributing virtually nothing to society but now he gets SS and a very extravagant retirement package along with SS. SS is in trouble and the first people to be dropped from the plan should be gov workers who already get plenty with their retirement so those of us who really need it don't lose it. This country is hiring more gov employeees, paying them more and giving them better retirement all the time as the working people that make this country prosperous get less and less and have to pay their counterparts in the gov more and more. This upside down economic system is doomed too fail, the people who spend their lives sucking on the government tit will be the downfall of America.
 
I am also a retired federal employee. When I first started, my manager made a point of telling me that there is nothing in government that can't wait until tomorrow. Thereafter I had numerous occasions to observe people industriously and conscientiously working away at jobs which should never have been assigned - the equivalent of digging a hole in the morning and filling it up in the afternoon. Others who had ideas for becoming more productive could never get a hearing. And there was a core of competent people who made it their business to serve the public because they believed in what they were doing.

It is extremely difficult to fire an incompetent federal employee. It will take a large chunk of the supervisor's time for most of a year because he/she has to prove to a review board that said employee has received every chance at remedial education, counseling, reassignment, you name it - and it still hasn't worked. However there is a good reason for this, because federal managers can be just as petty and mean as anyone you have ever met. The practical solution is known as the Turkey Farm: a poor manager is put in charge of poor employees and the office is assigned to produce useless reports and meaningless appreciations until they retire.

Guess I had a different experience. In my career I saw or was involved in the removal of five employees. Reason for dismissal ranged from misuse of govt credit card, misuse of govt. property, taking a govt. vehicle on an unauthorized trip (personal trip for days), unable to pass fitness standards.

It got harder as time went on to fire someone. The reason imo was the trend in govt towards political correctness , accepting the "its not my fault" mentality, and "you owe me" attitude.
 
Not actually. As a CSRS employee, you can retire with no penalty at age 55 with 30 years of service. At that point your pension is 56.25% of the average of your three highest years of salary. The percentage increases by 2% per year for each year you continue to work after that. You would need just 14% to reach 70% which is seven more years on top of 30, for a total of 37 years. Still a pretty long time. You can't go any higher than 80% of the average high three, so after 42 years of service, you're just stuck there.


Often they either are fired or the incredible wisdom of resigning is pointed out to them. Nobody loves a lummox.


Your correct for CSRS. I was basically making an assumption the brother in law did not put that many years in. There are a few who max out, put that is more the execption than the rule, imo.
 
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