Re: Jere Robings’ May 26 commentary, “Too-generous county pension plan needs fixing”:
Mr. Robings’ commentary was on point, but it highlighted only a few of the ways that government employee compensation and benefits are too generous.
— In the private sector today, it is increasingly rare to find defined benefit pension plans, the kind our government employees receive. These plans have been replaced with 401(k) plans, which are merely an employee’s own money put into a tax-deferred account, possibly with some matching money by the employer. (By the way, many of our government employees also have a version of this plan, with matching funds!) In other words, most private sector employees no longer have pension plan coverage at all. Most major public companies today fall into this category, including Cisco, Amgen and, soon, IBM.
— When a private sector employer does offer a defined benefit pension plan, it almost never has a cost of living adjustment feature, so the benefits received at retirement remain constant forever. This is in stark contrast to government employee pensions that often have a COLA provision that will ratchet their cost upward over time.
— Private sector plans generally pay out full retirement benefits only after an employee has reached full retirement age — 65 — so retirement benefits are paid out over a considerably shorter period than to government workers who can often retire with full benefits at 50 or so.
— Private sector employees are generally not permitted to accumulate sick or vacation time and carry it over to subsequent years. Though it is not legal to have “use it or lose it” provisions in California, most companies do have “use it or stop accruing it” plans which prevent employees from accumulating more than a year’s worth of sick and/or vacation time. This stands in stark contrast to the stories you hear about government employees using their hundreds of stockpiled days to retire still earlier.
— Lastly, government workers often receive medical insurance coverage after they retire, which is very expensive, and, as a general rule, no longer offered in the private sector, even by the dwindling number of companies that continue to offer a defined benefit pension plan.
Government workers today receive a package of current and deferred benefits that is more generous in almost every possible way than those received by the private sector employees who must foot the bill. As the number of retirees increases, these overly generous benefits will become an unsupportable burden on taxpayers. San Diego’s current pension meltdown should be a lesson to all of us.
— Jef Kurfess, Westlake Village
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