Huh? Don’t many jobs still have gold plated pensions?
Like millions upon millions?
They need to be paid out somehow.
Like millions upon millions?
They need to be paid out somehow.
...no. It doesn't even matter what the rest of the words in the question are. Just no, lol.
> They need to be paid out somehow.
No they don't. Lots of pensions, especially the not-gilded ones, go bankrupt.
In fact, that's precisely what happens to pensions of companies that are acquired by PE. The company gets stripped for parts, it goes bankrupt, and PBGC covers a fraction of the affected pensioners' payouts.
In other words, with or without PE, bloated pensions ultimately end up being the taxpayer's burden.
Why are you replying to a comment where you believe the words “doesn’t even matter”?
I find this characterization offensive. Who is to judge if the defined benefit pension if a primary school teacher or fireman, for example, is bloated? It's part of the negotiated pay package, nothing more or less.
Teachers are the easy ones to point to, it is hard to be mad at an underpaid teacher who receives a reasonable pension for life. We certainly can be mad at NYPD scamming the system to get $100-200k/year for life.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-nyc-police-overtime-...
[2] https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/newly-retired-nypd...
Boomers (only people I know receiving pensions) use pensions to fund lavish lifestyles without having build major companies.
Is that not the case for police unions in the states?
“If your last few years before you retire, you work 300, 400 hours of overtime and bump up your pay by $40,000, that all goes into the salary that your pension is based on,” said Ana Champeny, director of city studies at New York’s Citizens Budget Commission."
So yeah, it seems like a bad idea to be able to scam the pension system like that.
And yes, pensions are a major part of the PE funding, but not all of it. There are a bunch of incredibly rich people who are also profiting from all of this at exorbitant rates. Can we be mad at them instead?
A Phoenix police sergeant who was recently in the news for other reasons was listed as having a total salary in 2025 of $430,000.
Nothing personal here. It's possible for some pensions to suck and not others. It's also possible for a pension to suck and its beneficiaries to not suck.
Do they have to be paid out in full, though? I remember cases in the past where a company went bankrupt and had to renege on some parts of pensions, so maybe you'll see that again?
I don’t see how it is relevant, unless the rate is close to 100%.