Yes Tier 1 was abused by many when you look at final payout as a percentage of final years’ earnings–but then you look at their final salaries.

I’m not a public employee, PERS recipient, or even near retirement age (I hope) as of yet, just curious. I looked up school teachers and felt absolute pity for their final salaries after decades of service–and that’s WITH the help of a union. I’m talking people who retired in the early 00s with 30-40 years of service and final salaries of 50k who with their stretching of tier 1 rules might get a 60k retirement benefit. Imagine how much of that has evaporated in the last 5 years with inflation.

Definitely better paid state employees who made off like bandits, but my heart goes out to teachers seeing some of these numbers for people who challenged me and helped shape me. Some select high quality news outlets like to pretend that state retirements are so uniformly, unimaginably generous, but reality is certainly different for anyone after 2003 PERS reforms in Oregon where most of the exploits were nerfed. Also, fuck those news outlets for trying to condition people into thinking requisite fingernail biting until retirement is necessary. It’s all historically recent when corps saw the opportunity to offload managing retirement funds…and your security. An incredibly small portion of humans even in the age of technology have the analytical skills to manage the intense web of financial byproducts of not having a guaranteed pension system managed by professionals. 401k this, IRA that, investment tranches…it literally takes paying a professional to complete it…that of course you get the privilege of paying. The median not average or mean amount 50-year-olds have in retirement accounts in the US currently is 57,000. If that isn’t a damning indictment of the abdication of duty it was to push retirement management on the populous, just wait. Come back to this thread every 5 years for the next 3 decades as the myth of “retirement” collapses and is slowly replaced in news headlines with “elder engagement” and “stay-fessional” and “senior-career opportunity”.

Parting thought; people stopped going into education decades ago and that was when tier 1 exploits were still available. We had a related conversation when former secretary of state Shana Fagan was shown to be completely corrupted working for someone she should have oversight of…but her salary is $90k as #3(2?) in charge of the state. Lack of integrity has no excuse, good riddance but the salaries are APPALLING. We have one of the lower performing education systems in the country now, I think doubling salaries for educators would be a starting point in Oregon.

Thanks for your thoughts.