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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
On average, federal workers are paid at rates that are about 20% below what they would earn in the private sector for comparable work. They do receive benefits that may appear generous, especially as the private sector continues to allow and even supports the oligarchy's stripping away of what were once even cushier benefits. So, no more gold watch, but thank god you don't have to pay union dues or have anyone to turn to when management screws you over.

Not quite:

Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds. Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.

Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.

Federal pay ahead of private industry - USATODAY.com
 
Who the heck relies on social security as their only retirement?

Yes, before 1984 there was a different system and Fed employees didn't pay into SS, but it became much less generous and they pay into SS

Thank God!! it became much less generous.

As to "Who the heck . . ." You must live in a bubble.
 
Adjunct to my quote above re Federal wages. Here's another quotation from the same link:

These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
 
But you are right. The first recipient had never paid a dime into the system.
But he did pay a nickel for the one day that he worked under SS before he retired. Those "didn't pay a dime" people were lying to you by hiding behind the literal truth of a figure of speech. You fell for it. Nice going!

Roosevelt believed that people would become willing participants if they had an expectation that they would get back the investment at a future date. Ponzi would have been proud.
Dingbatism abounds here. One expects to get back only the money one puts into a freaking coffee can or stuffs under the mattress. Even a short-term CD or passbook savings account returns more money than what one paid in.
 
it should be means tested

even if you paid into it your whole life
 
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.
I retired from a Design Engineering job at a hand held electronics manufacturer (they made the news last week) and I'm collecting SS and getting a pension. This was part of the deal that I moved from a small firm to a large one to get. At the large private firm I had to deal with workers that did very little very slowly and they were getting the same benefits that I was. Also, before I left, a members of a church got too much control of who was RIFed and who got promotions etc. So how is this different than government jobs?
 
He's probably getting Social Security based on employment at another job. As a Federal employee, he doesn't pay into Social Security.
All federal employees hired since 1983 are FERS employees who pay into Social Security. And their pensions at retirement consist of Social Security, a small service-based pension, plus whatever they may have managed to do with a 401-k. Those who were hired earlier and did not elect to convert to FERS in order to take advantage of the 401-k matching funds offered under FERS are still covered under the old CSRS system. They receive a much more generous service-based pension, no Social Security at all, plus whatever they have made out of a 401-k that only they ever paid into. CSRS employees have paid 7% of their gross pay into the program, since their first day on the job, all of it fully taxed.

IMO, all Federal/State employees should have 401K's. Not those overly-generous defined benefit plans they now enjoy. Maybe someday...
At least at the federal level at least, they all do have 401-k's, but the rest of this is incorrect and also silly. There is no a priori generosity difference simply because one plan is a defined-benefit plan and another is a defined-contribution plan. That depends on the actual terms and numbers involved. The one and only thing that can be said for certain is that the move from defined-benefit plans to defined-contribution plans has been all and only a deliberate transfer of RISK from the employer to the employee. Once again, you are the stuckee. Imagine that.
 
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The one and only thing that can be said for certain is that the move from the defined-benefit plans to defioned-contribution plans has been all and only a deliberate transfer of RISK from the employer to the employee. Once again, you are the stuckee. Imagine that.

A defined benefit plan is the most generous pension plan on planet earth. As a taxpayer, it would please me no end if these defined benefit plans disappeared in the public sector. They will . . . it'll just take a while.
 
No, actually, you describe what everyone seems to think is the "plan" of Social Security, but it isn't. When you pay, you're explicitly paying for other people, not stocking up for yourself.
Nothing but disinformation. SS is implemented by two separate sets of laws. One set describes the taxes that your employer must pay, including the authority to take half of it from your gross pay. The other set describes the benefits that SS should pay to an eligible retiree under various circumstances, two of which are how long you worked and how much you earned.

Like any other insurance operation, SS pays current claims out of current premiums with any remainder being salted away as future reserves. But at the same time, the very employment and wages that resulted in such taxation are also increasing the amount of credits and earnings you will one day be eligible to benefit from. Thus while paying current taxes, you very much ARE stocking up for yourself in the future.
 
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Nothing but disinformation. SS is impelented by two separate sets of laws. One set descibes the taxes that your employer must pay, inclduing the authority to take half of it from your gross pay. The other set describes the benefits that SS should pay to an eligible retiree under various circumstances, two of whcih are how long you worked and how much you earned.

Like any other insurance operation, current claims are paid out of current premiums with any remainder being salted away as future reserves. But at the same time, the employment that resulted in the taxation is also increasing the amount of benefits you will one day be eligible for. Thus while paying current taxes, you very much ARE stocking up for yourself in the future.

You describe it as "insurance," yet also claim it works like an individual retirement account. I therefore treat this with the all the seriousness it deserves. :roll:

I understand you need to pick fights just to pick fights, which is why I tend to ignore anything you say, but if you're going to troll, you could at least not contradict the hell out yourself in the process. I didn't think it could actually happen, but you've managed to lower my regard for you even more.

So, go tell it to someone who cares.
 
A nice example of laughable garbage. Ponzi schemes fail because they lack access to a reliable income stream. If Charles Ponzi had actually beeen able to make money out of international postal-coupon arbitrage, his company might still be around today. But he couldn't, so it failed in six months instead. Social Security has been around for 75 years and will be for at least that long again. This is because it is plugged into perhaps the laregst and most reliable income stream in world history -- the wages of US workers. Social Security will continue to have income for as long as American workers do.

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?
 
This is particularly true for judges and politicians.
I'd go for unpaid politicians.....but this is going too far the other way...I do know that several generations ago, the Maine state congressmen were not paid for their "service".
IMO, they are overpaid by a factor of 2X.....That the law allows them to vote on their compensation for what little they do...Talk about the need of reform.....
Congresspersons are BY FAR the most egregiously underpaid executives in America. Ths salaries of federal judges are also an abomination and should at least be doubled if we are to have any hope of continuing to attract competent much less exceptional candidates to these positions. People want to drive a Cadillac and pay for a Yugo. That never works out well.
 
I retired from a Design Engineering job at a hand held electronics manufacturer (they made the news last week) and I'm collecting SS and getting a pension. This was part of the deal that I moved from a small firm to a large one to get. At the large private firm I had to deal with workers that did very little very slowly and they were getting the same benefits that I was. Also, before I left, a members of a church got too much control of who was RIFed and who got promotions etc. So how is this different than government jobs?

The difference is tax payers are paying your plush retirement fund if you retire from gov.
 
Not quite:
Yes, quite! Your hapless USA Today numbers are a meaningless comparison of comparable JOB TITLES, not a comparison of comparable WORK. BLS and OPM have been required since 1990 to conduct detailed surveys and analyses by region to estimate the disparity between federal pay rates and prevailaing local pay rates for the same type and level of work. The pay-gap has at times been as low as 18%. In the most recent report, it was just over 24%...

fed_pay_disparity_2010.jpg
 
The difference is tax payers are paying your plush retirement fund if you retire from gov.
So, if someone works for the government as hard as I worked in the private sector they don't deserve the same retirement benifits I got. OK, I understand your position.
 
So, if someone works for the government as hard as I worked in the private sector they don't deserve the same retirement benifits I got. OK, I understand your position.

First off they don't work as hard as those in private industry. Secondly they were overpaid for 25 years or more and had great benefits. Last but not least 70% of your pay when you retire for the rest of your life is better than any private pension I have heard of and us tax payers are already on the hook for that, giving them SS too is salt in my open wound.
 
Who the heck relies on social security as their only retirement?
90% of seniors receive Social Security. Among seniors, about half of married couples and three-quarters of singles receive at least half of their total income from SS. About one-fourth of married couples and one-half of singles receive at least 90% of their total income from SS.

Yes, before 1984 there was a different system and Fed employees didn't pay into SS, but it became much less generous and they pay into SS
A FERS pension is much less generous than a CSRS pension because it is on the order of one-tenth the size. But an SS pension in addition, plus what a few people can manage to do with all those extra 401-k contributions can certainly lead to total FERS benefits that exceed total CSRS benefits. Still, the vast majority of FERS people would tell you that they wish they had had the CSRS option available to them. They would nearly all be happy to trade a little extra freedom for a little extra security. And Ben Franklin would have been as well if he were alive today.
 
Yes, quite! Your hapless USA Today numbers are a meaningless comparison of comparable JOB TITLES, not a comparison of comparable WORK. BLS and OPM have been required since 1990 to conduct detailed surveys and analyses by region to estimate the disparity between federal pay rates and prevailaing local pay rates for the same type and level of work. The pay-gap has at times been as low as 18%. In the most recent report, it was just over 24%...

View attachment 67143981

Link please.
 
You pay into social security....so after retirement you should get that money you paid into it...back...that is the entire plan of social security.

Social Security is a goverment charitable work. Nobody is entitled to it. The Supreme Court was quite clear about that.
 
A defined benefit plan is the most generous pension plan on planet earth. As a taxpayer, it would please me no end if these defined benefit plans disappeared in the public sector. They will . . . it'll just take a while.
No one can make such a claim. One dollar per year is a defined-benefit plan. I'm quite confident that this would not be the most generous pension plan on the planet. I would suggest here that you may be related to the Koch brothers, or that you have spent far too much time listening to corporate propaganda.
 
No one can make such a claim. One dollar per year is a defined-benefit plan. I'm quite confident that this would not be the most generous pension plan on the planet. I would suggest here that you may be related to the Koch brothers, or that you have spent far too much time listening to corporate propaganda.

Having owned my own business with up to six employees for 20 years, I can assure you my knowledge is first-hand. Of course it depends on what the "defined benefit" is -- if it's 1% of pay, then it's quite obviously not a generous plan. That, however, is NOT the case in the public sector -- which is pretty much the only place Defined Benefit Plans exist.
 
Congresspersons are BY FAR the most egregiously underpaid executives in America. Ths salaries of federal judges are also an abomination and should at least be doubled if we are to have any hope of continuing to attract competent much less exceptional candidates to these positions. People want to drive a Cadillac and pay for a Yugo. That never works out well.

My congressman is OVER paid. Egregiously so. Federal judges I think are fairly or generouly compensated.
 
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