It’s time to starve them to death. The alternative is that we will all starve.

Nobody ever said public employees shouldn’t have decent retirement benefits. However, pensions that replace 90/75% or even 60% of a former employee’s career highest pay (sometimes even spiked with a promotion or other methods) and then starts collecting full pension long before normal retirement age with automatic cost of living increases, is way beyond what once was considered a gold standard defined benefit pension in the private sector. Before these plans started fading away, a secure retirement from a blue-chip company was considered to be one that replaced 80/90% of pre-retirement pay, based on the “three-legged stool” of a pension (for those lucky enough to have them), Social Security and personal savings. A non-safety public employee with enough years to retire with a 75% pension at 55 who lives to 80 will receive a pension payout with a present value 3-4 times as great as a really good 1970′s style pension in the private sector that pays less than 50% (based on average of 3 or 5 highest years), starts at 65 and has no cost-of-living increase. For example, a $60k pension for an $80k employee would pay out $1.5 million by age 80. The private plan would pay out less than $600k reduced to a present value of about $450k. I’ve run the numbers doing the comparison using pension plan details from a major company that is known for its generous benefits (not for a “race to the bottom”) and whose pension plan is the same as it was more than 30 years ago. Then there’s retiree health care benefits — a whole ‘nother discussion. What is going to happen because of budget pressures is that the salaries of working public employees will stagnate and be further reduced by what they will have to pay into the plans, while the pensions of their retired predecessors will continue to grow due to guaranteed COLA’s — so that the retiree pensions will eventually be higher than the working incomes of their successors.