re: Retired Oregon public university worker to receive largest pension in state: $913,000 a YE

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He's very much an unusual beast. There are very few public sector employees that will ever see that salary, whether they be in athletics, academia, healthcare, or whatever.


When I said the unusual beast comment I was referring to his retirement percentage. I didn't bother to research his position, CV and comps to make any determination of whether his salary was reasonable.

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Then it's pretty much irrelevant to the argument of whether most public sector education pensions are entirely out of line - which they are, pretty much across the board.

I love seeing the social media feeds of teachers protests and such not realizing that the total economic cost of a teacher is probably higher in the U.S. than it is in every other country in the world considering retirement, benefits, vacation, etc. and yet we are like 30th in the world in results. Fix that shite and I may start to listen.

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If states properly fund their pension accounts through the years and don't steal from it there is no problem covering pensions if they did their math right.

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Pensions were never intended/designed to handle long term interest rate environments combined with current mortality table improvements

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It isn't like the Dow and other major investments have been in some sort of doldrums for the last 30 years.

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Pensions generally do not invest heavily in highly volatile investments like stocks / "the Dow" as a precaution to maintain solvency.


Most of the assets that back pensions are required to be in the low risk securities like bonds, CMOs/CDOs and similar investor grade investments

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Pensions generally do not invest heavily in highly volatile investments like stocks / "the Dow" as a precaution to maintain solvency.

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Though I didn't look it up I would be willing to bet Oregon has billions in index funds or funds that are heavily invested in stocks with an eye toward benchmarking the Dow index. They will certainly have this offset by many billions more in less volatile in order to fully fund during any major economic setbacks.

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Though I didn't look it up I would be willing to bet Oregon has billions in index funds or funds that are heavily invested in stocks with an eye toward benchmarking the Dow index. They will certainly have this offset by many billions more in less volatile in order to fully fund during any major economic setbacks.

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And none of it even comes within a dog hair of addressing public pension obligations.

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DO YOU frickING UNDERSTAND THAT?


Even on the OT if you are not able to engage in a civil conversation with someone that you disagree with and avoid yelling and cursing some introspection is probably warranted versus worrying about the other persons "worthiness".

Have a good evening.

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How about this - let's compare what the total economic costs of a teacher - including retirement, healthcare, benefits, vacation, etc. - for the U.S. are vis a vis a typical worker. Would you like to do that?

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Though I didn't look it up I would be willing to bet Oregon has billions in index funds or funds that are heavily invested in stockswith an eye toward benchmarking the Dow index

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Pension fund investment allocation is not designed to benchmark the DOW or any other fund but specifically to meet liability cashflow requirements

Trying to benchmark the DOW or any other equity index doesn't fit the needs of a pension fund.


... and they would never track the DOW anyways. While the DOW is a popular metric, the calculation opens it up to large swings in volatility that would be bad for a pension fund. The S&P 500 would be chosen before the DOW

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There isn't a similar comparison because PRIVATE PENSIONS DON'T frickING EXIST BECAUSE THEY ARE ECONOMICALLY UNVIABLE.

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They do most certainly exist. Most skilled craft union locals have a self funded pension and often a annuity.

I only worked 6 months last year, but since that was in a local (IBEW) in California with a really high amount dedicated to the pension contribution, I added over 4 years to my pension based in Baton Rouge.

There were a lot of articles on Auburn's AD Jay Jacobs 'retiring' recently because his pension is through the roof also. I'm pretty sure that Alabama capped the pension at some point but Jacobs was grandfathered in before they did.

I don't have an issue paying the guy $1.7 mil, but it's absolutely absurd to give him a $917k pension for life. The pension should have been capped at $250k or something like that. Or his pay should have been something like $500k from the state and $1.2 mil from grants that don't put him into the retirement system.

Why do municipalities not do 401k type retirement plans? It makes no sense.

Myth. I have worked in both. I am sure you can lump people in groups to skew data but when you really compare individuals they are making their market rate.