Just saw this - makes my blood boil.
Vote 'em all out!
http://www.theconservativenews.com/todays_top_untold_stories
So after you vote them all out, what are you going to do for a government? And BTW, did you even try to verify the facts in your link? A quick reading of the Wikipedia article would tell you that your link is incorrect.
Edited to add, here are a couple of sentences from the Wikipedia article on Congressional pensions. “The pension amount is determined by a formula that takes into account the years served and the average pay for the top three years in terms of payment. In 2002, the average pension payment ranged from $41,000 to $55,000. For example, a member of Congress who worked for 22 years and had a top three-year average salary of $153,900 would be eligible for a pension payment of $84,645 per year.”
Or in an easier reading format:
The article you quoted is false.
Reported.
Ah, thanks. Beat me to it.
Since there is no General Question, moving to MPSIMS.
samclem, Moderator
Do facts have any particular importance to you? It appears not. The “proposed 28th amendment” is nothing short of retarded. Since congressmen are, by definition, citizens, they are indeed subject to the laws that they pass.
How nice for them. mrAru gets something like $1200 a month, that he has to pay taxes upon, so realistically he banks about $750-800. Nice for 20 years of substandard housing, making less than he would at a civilian equivalent job, being deployed frequently and exposure to more in the way of hazardous materials and radiation than most civilians, certainly more than our politicals get.
The OP’s link claimed that politicians “receive full pay retirement after serving one term.” The quote I provided from Wikipedia was meant to rebut that claim. And BTW, at least those of you with government jobs still get a traditional (defined benefit) pension. I’ve only ever had private employers and the best I can expect is a few percentage points contributed to a 401(k) plan.
Most laws, but they pass excemptions that apply to them and not citizens.
But if I understand the system they recieve some pension after one term. They are fully vested after 2 years, isn’t the federal labor law standard 5 years before being fully vested?
I don’t think that’s correct. Again quoting from the Wikipedia article linked to above, “Members who participated in the congressional pension system are vested after five (5) years of service.”
How about going to the source?
Cite a few? A lot of the right wing glurge emails piss and moan that congressmen don’t pay into SS, even though that hasn’t been true for a generation.
I wouldn’t be so quick to say that everyone with a govenrment job gets a defined benifit pension. That hasn’t been true in a lot of years.
If so, that’s a good thing. One of the big reasons that so many state and local governments are in financial trouble today is because their pension programs are woefully underfunded. For an employer, the big advantage of a defined contribution plan (401(k) plans and the like) is that their risk is limited.
Sarge6thCav, this is the second post you’ve made that links to something in The Conservative News that has turned out to be completely false. (other post)
I suggest that this may not be the best place to get information that is factual, and in the future, take anything you read in The Conservative News with a large grain of salt. It seems that they either make stuff up, or do not fact check very well.
I don’t want to start a fight or anything. As a retired military guy myself, I have to say that it’s the career that I (and your husband) chose, knowing full well what the retirement benefits would be. Had I wished for a more lucrative career, I wouldn’t have stayed in the military. Upon retirement, I went to work in both the public and private sectors at jobs that the military prepared me to succeed wildly at, and made enough to retire for good 20 years later. The medical benefit alone made the military career worthwhile, IMO. I pay out half my military retirement to an ex-wife, so get even less than your spouse, but it was worth it to me. Expecting military “retirement” to actually pay the bills and allow one to live a life of ease is not realistic. Congress critters get more in retirement because they make more in salary. It’s no better or worse than retirements from trade unions, IME.
I am more bothered by people claiming we get way more in benefits than we actually do … and that active duty get more than they actually do as well. That ‘free housing’? I walked into a unit at Oceana they wanted us to take, and the cockroaches were running around the floor as we walked in in broad daylight, and didn’t run away from us. For every roach one sees in a room, purportedly there are 500 in the walls. You could not walk in the utility room of the unit without crunching. I toured a unit here in Groton that had a leaky water heater patched with duct tape and one of the fiberglass emergency patch kits out of one of the pipe repair kits off a sub. It looked like it had been there for about 5 years from the rust and calcium based encrustations making stalagtites off the pipes. [or stalagmites, cant remember which are the dangly ones] and dependents medical care was typified by Dr Death, who while working in the base ER had 23 malpractice suits against him, and who prescribed pennicillin for me, for bronchitis when I went in for chest pains [pleurisey] after 6 months of pneumonia. I have a screaming hot pink folder with Pennicillin on it in 3 inch letters indicating a pennicillin allergy, and an inch of paperwork resulting from that 6 months of pneumonia. In an incredibly busy ER I could see not bothering to read a folder, but when it is 2 am, empty and you have been kept waiting 20 minutes for someone to show up, you might think that your doctor actually stopped to read the folder.
I hear ya, sistah. We lived in what was barely above substandard housing for a number of years. In California we had a fire; luckily nobody was hurt. In Mass., as an E-7 with 19 years in, we had the worst housing I ever had in the military. Paper thin walls in an eight-plex, with inadequate plumbing in which all eight units daisy-chained into one wye fitting down line. We had a flood one Thanksgiving day because the idiot son of our neighbor flushed his underwear (which he had shat in) down the toilet, plugging the line for all eight units. But I couldn’t have rented a big enough place (four kids) locally for the amount of housing allowance paid for that area. Still, I signed on voluntarily, and most places were livable, with a couple of them even being nice places.
Wait: Dr. Death? Was that the O-6 Navy captain who botched operations because he was nearly blind?