That article is bizarre. It makes statements like this repeatedly:
> Some career city workers even retire in their mid-50s while collecting pension benefits equal to most of their final salary. In contrast, private sector workers cannot begin drawing a full Social Security benefit until nearly a decade later – at the age of 67.
Why on Earth would you compare Social Security with public pensions? Of course private sector workers cannot draw Social Security until 67. City workers can't draw Social Security until 67 either. But private sector workers can draw on their pensions (the few that are left) and on 401(k) accounts as early as age 55, too.
Both city workers and private sector workers draw on Social Security and their retirement funds, whether those be investment accounts or pensions. Why the strange pretense that public sector pensions are equivalent to private sector retirees collecting Social Security?
We're supposed to be outraged at 'excessive' pensions that, at the extreme end, match the salary of the retiree before they retired. But that's exactly where private sector pensions are, and that's exactly what you're supposed to target in your 401(k)/IRA etc. (Of course, the reality is that the vast majority of 401(k) accounts are drastically underfunded, but as this doesn't represent a liability to anyone, nobody cares.)
Then you have paragraphs like this:
> The amount of money a career city worker contributes to his or her pension has no bearing on what that worker will receive in retirement.
...And the article then goes on to note that a) pension contributions are a percentage of your salary and b) the % of your salary depends on your years of service and c) the pension ultimately pays out your salary every year, assuming (b). So it absolutely does depend on the amount of money a career city worker contributes.
Finally, you have this comparison:
> Rhea Fries Boldman’s experience as a Chicago Public Schools teacher reveals just how out of sync city worker contributions are compared to the benefits they receive.
> Boldman retired in 2012 at the age of 59 with a final average salary of $87,057.
> Boldman is receiving an annual pension of $71,674 – and she will receive $2.4 million in pension benefits during her retirement if she lives to her full life expectancy.
> Yet she contributed just $147,032 to the pension system over her 30-plus year career. Her direct contributions to the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund will cover just 6.2 percent of her expected lifetime benefits. Including the interest earned on those contributions, the total would cover approximately 12 percent of her expected lifetime pension benefits.
Hopefully Boldman is earning a lot more than interest in her pension account. If not, that's mismanagement. These numbers aren't drastically different from what you'd see in a 401(k). Were I to retire at 59, my company's 401(k) projection calculator says I'd have contributed 380k and would receive 3.5 million. I expect this is optimistic, but you can still see there is nothing totally ludicrous about those numbers.
EDIT: My own back-of-the-hand calculations indicate 'optimistic' is perhaps an understatement. Hm.