Tab for Unfunded Retiree Benefits Pegged at $30,000 per Household
A statistic that is likely to become a favorite at Gov. Chris Christie’s town hall meetings comes courtesy of the New Jersey Pension and Health Benefit Study Commission, which yesterday reported that “each of the state’s 3.2 million households would have to…
Some common sense solutions.
1. Raise the retirement age to 67 and gradually increase to 70. Social Security is now up to 67 and also needs to be raised to 70. In order to obtain retiree health benefits, the retiree must be eligible for Medicare coverage first.
2. Never do what DiFrancesco did – gave public employees a pension contribution holiday; pension contributions for all current public employees should be raised to at least 10% and the public employer must finally fully fund the system.
3. Eliminate immediately all the double dipping of “younger retirees” who go back into a public employee retirement system (like police go to work in PERS while collecting a fat pension check from Police system).
4. End “grandfathering” to stop the abuses immediately.
5. Perhaps consolidation of Educational and Police services should be done at the County level to broaden the tax base to help pay for these services. That could make services more efficient and cost effective and eliminate the need for all the School Superintendents and Police Chiefs.
These need to be honestly discussed and debated to obtain consensus to resolve this rather serious problem.
Another idea I heard that I like is that 1/12 of the required yearly payment be made every month….that way in the future, Governors would not be able to do what CC pulled in June which was to not make anything close to the agreed upon required payment at the end of the fiscal year and claim they had not other choice.
Your missing what this article is telling us all …if you want to improve your quality of life and at the same time reduce your debt by 30K move out of state
The NJ voting majority continues their irresponsible insanity. They select politicians who provide guaranteed lifetime financial independence for public workers at the expense of guaranteed poverty for everyone else. Theft is theft, even if you can justify stealing from the poor to give to the rich.
Tom Stokes for Governor!
Very well done big issues.
I would like to suggest items that would help keep those seniors with discretionary income living and spending in NJ while also continuing to share these confiscatory and unpayable debts run up by the corrupt democrat machine in exchange for public union votes.
End or greatly modify state income tax on pensions
Raise threshold on estate tax to fed levels