It’s always a relief to read Dean Baker on Social Security and Beat the Press. Here he is rubbing a NYT writer’s nose in his demand the public employees return their pensions.
Adjusting for education and experience public sector workers actually get paid slightly less on average than their counterparts in the private sector….This doesn’t mean that there are not some workers who game the system and some categories of workers who may not get too much. (Firefighters and police tend to do best. Of course these people regularly risk their lives on the job during their working years.) …if we cut all public employee pensions in half tomorrow it would not create a single job or save anyone’s house. …culprit in chief is Alan Greenspan, arguably the worst central banker of all time. He insisted that everything was just fine even as the housing bubble expanded in size to more than $8 trillion at its peak….Mr. Greenspan has retired as Fed chairman…If there is any retired public employee in the country who should be returning a pension, it is Mr. Greenspan….he gets something like $160,000 a year as a pension from the government….If people want to be angry at someone, the multi-million dollar bonuses going to hotshot traders at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan might be a better target than a retired school teacher’s $3,000-a-month pension….
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