Food for thought.
There is no law against being a fool. SS is meanwhile insurance, and the hazard insured against is the once-common risk of outliving one's capacity to earn a living. That point may come at different times in different people's lives, depending on one's physical condition and the type of work one engages in. Thus, some may need to take early-retirement at reduced benefits as early as age 62, some may take full-retirement with full benefits at age 66, some may take delayed-retirement with enhanced benefits as late as age 70, and some may wait even longer than that. And we mustn't foregt that roughly the equivalent of a $400K commercial life insurance policy and a $350K commercial disability insurance policy are thrown into the mix for all covered workers at no extra charge.
Everyone should care about being misled and lied to by political hacks. It seems that some seek that sort of thing out instead.
That's easy. Social Security is the most popular and successful social insurance program in the history of the world. Three generations of Americans have already been served and the system is sitting on a reserve of better than $2.7 trillion that will serve as a buffer in serving the next generation and quite probably one or two or more after that.
Taxpayers are paying for the far cushier severance and retirement packages and bonuses of even mid-level coprorate executives. We just call them consumers when they do that. Same people, though. Including you.
Actually, a big eye-opener for those who leave federal service for the pirvate sector is what a hapless, sorry-ass mess of an operation is actually going on in so many places out there. Infighting, backstabbing, silos, bottlenecks, morons, turf wars, nepotism, blatant discrimination, wanton wastes of time, money and resources -- it's all enough to drive a lot of folks straight back into the government again.
Do you know why Goldman Sachs pays its people so well at such an early age? It's because they view themselevs as a high-end graduate school, and they want their people to be able to AFFORD to take a a few years off and go do a government job for a while.
Poor baby. The costs of FERS retirees are all paid for out of employer-employee contributions. Just as in the private sector. The costs of CSRS retirees are not fully covered. This is because prior to the creation of FERS, agencies were not required to (and didn't) make contrbutions to the system. Benefits were all paid for out of accrued employee contributions. The laws that created FERS changed that and agencies now do have to make contributions, but the hole left by their roughly 65-year absence plus interest thereon means that some general revenues are used to suipport CSRS benefits. Effectively, the last CSRS employees would have been hired by 1980, so the last of them will be out the door soon enough.
Looks like you've picked up a sympathy vote in the past couple of hours. Justice-voters seem to be giving you the old Romney-Ryan treatment.
Thank you for conceding the point. And I guess you would agree then that the oligarchs have indeed succeeded in raping the unorganized and thus defenseless workers of the private sector, saddling them with all of the risks of defined-contribution plans, plans that depend critically on the unlikely event of Joe Schmoe somehow turning into an investment wizard, while of course divesting themselves of any present or future obligation to employees other than to sit back and watch them sink or swim on their own, the suckers.
Rank and file House members are paid $174,000 per year. An Associate Justice of the Supreme Court is paid $213,900 per year, Circuit Court judges are paid $184,500 per year, and District Court judges make $174,000 per year. If you think that's overpaid fro the job, you must live somewhere in the outer suburbs of Past-the-Old-Stump.
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.
Really? They run a lot of the show.
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.
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