Government pensions are generational theft

For a while now, I’ve been under the impression that most Boomers employed by governments and receiving huge and unsustainable pensions were either in denial, bad at math, or both. Well, finally, I’ve got proof that at least some of these people are aware just how absurd their payments are.

Daniel Borenstein of the Contra Costa Times, whose already written quite a bit on the out-of-control pension system in the Northern California area, now brings us news of a former government worker going to court to essentially hide the amount of her pension from the public eye.

DONNA IRWIN doesn’t want us to know how much her public employee pension is.

The former captain who worked in the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Office for 37 years before retiring in 1992 with a base salary of about $68,000 a year now receives a pension of more than $100,000 annually. The question is, how much more? She doesn’t want the retirement association to tell us and she’s gone to court to try to block disclosure.

Full article here

The money quote is Irwin’s reason for attempting to suppress from the public (you know, the one’s ponying up for her luxurious retirement) knowledge of the full amount of the pension:

Disclosure of the information, Irwin argues, would cause her “irreparable injury in that my name released in conjunction with my monthly pension benefits would place my safety at risk and my privacy rights will be jeopardized.”

I’ll just assume the privacy bit was thrown into the statment for added effect. The gem is that she obviously understands that the slaves current workforce is getting the pitchforks ready for those that have sold them down the river.

We can expect more games like these in the future as retiring Boomers, especially those in the public sector, face the mathematics of unsupportable benefit packages promised by unscrupulous politicians of the past. After all, just last month, in the great and insolvent state of California, angry taxpayers rejected futher tax increases. Unfortunately, Californians had to lose upwards of 50% of their homes’ values and a double digit unemployement rate before realizing that paying firefighters upwards of $200,000/year plus benefits is not sustainable in the long run, at least while the average household salary in the private sector is about $60K.