Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
Of course the DB is a better deal for the employee, and no one debates that. But there's a harsh reality that people will need to face sooner or later; "we" can't fund people for 75 years of living with them working for say 35-40 years. If we want people to start working at say 20 years of age, retire at 55-60 and live until their 95, something has to change. The answer isn't always "just pay people", because it's not sustainable.
Regardless though, the "living wage" doesn't have to mean a DB pension. And for a municipality or many other entities that's just going to cause a lot of problems down the road.
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The example I like to give is teachers. In the early 1960s, there were 8 working teachers in Canada for every 1 retired teacher. When I was a kid in early 80s it was 5 to 1. By 2000 it was 3 to 1. Soon that number is projected to be 1.5 to 1. And the number of years teachers can expect to spend collecting pensions is now exceeding how long they spent teaching.
The math doesn’t work. We have utterly failed as a society to make the painful but necessary adjustments to a relentlessly aging population. It’s the same with health care costs and access. By the time we can no longer kick the can down the road, when it’s time to reconcile our expectations with our needs, it’s going to be ugly. Services being slashed deeper than anything we’ve seen in this country, and people getting 40 cents on the dollar on their pensions. That kind of ugly.