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> No, the officials making these pension decisions are politicians who mostly, while they may have government pensions, have lots of other resources, so that th
by djrogers 9y ago
> No, the officials making these pension decisions are politicians who mostly, while they may have government pensions, have lots of other resources, so that the pension doesn't matter much.
That's likely true in large cities, but most cities (and thus most city governments) aren't large.
- hackermailman 9y agoEven small city ex-politicians go into highly paid political consulting, where some company who wants to get into real estate development or bidding on public contracts will hire them to navigate the red tape and do introductions. They also end up as communications directors for whatever lobbyist group they did favors for, like banks and energy/utility corps making well over $300k/year. None of them need to rely on their city pensions for retirement.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> That's likely true in large cities, but most cities (and thus most city governments) aren't large. Many small city elected officials are part-time, often unpaid or with a largely symbolic stipend: they don't have public pensions from those positions at all. So they are even less subject to “if you make bad pension decisions, we’ll take your personal pension away” leverage than fulltime big-city and state politicians, who are likely to have (but not depend on) public pensions.