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Comment by iboisvert | Hacker News Reader

> bloated pensions

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.

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At least here in NYC, a large part of a NYPD officer's pension is calculated based on a 3-year look back from their retirement date, so there is a huge incentive to work as much overtime as possible in order to bump that number in your last few years of service. There are lots of stories of NYPD handing out easy overtime in massive numbers for each other, particularly when they are about to retire.

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...

All seem trivial compared to the money sucked up by billionaires, who seem to do little good for society. I'm not going to get angry at a police officer trying to maximize their retirement when we live in a society that celebrates people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.

Two things can be bad, you don’t have to pick.

Those billionaires are not hoarding cash like a dragon in a lair, their wealth is mostly in stock in productive (FB is debatable at this point) companies many people use.

Boomers (only people I know receiving pensions) use pensions to fund lavish lifestyles without having build major companies.

Yeah. How dare they… give you one-day delivery of anything you might want like magic for the first time in human history and help use fewer fossil fuels to prolong your planet’s life while also providing ubiquitous connectivity anywhere on the planet’s surface. The selfish scoundrels.

At least in my union defined benefit pension it specifically excludes overtime since that obviously is ripe for abuse. It's just your basic calculation: average of your best 5 years of salary at 2% per year of service.

Is that not the case for police unions in the states?

Normally includes overtime and only the best few years. Can juice it to get a pension around your 40 hour salary for life.

FTA: "Although paying for excess hours can cost less than hiring new cops, overtime contributes to future pension costs.

“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.

Why are we mad at someone who has worked their whole life and is getting a decent retirement, when the article is talking about PE management fees being extracted from essential services at enormous rates?

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?

Public pensions and PE used to pay retirements are exactly the same thing : they are extracted from value added by workers.

> We certainly can be mad at NYPD scamming the system to get $100-200k/year for life.

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.

My mom's a teacher. She would get a pension if the state could actually fund its pension program, which it can't now, and certainly won't when she retires in a few years. The government ones tend to actually have, yknow, morals and stuff.

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.

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