I think you could fix pensions without destroying them. Instead of reiterating what most others have said about how it’s a nice benefit and a way to compete wit

I think you could fix pensions without destroying them. Instead of reiterating what most others have said about how it’s a nice benefit and a way to compete with the private sector, I’ll point out that the way pension amounts are calculated (often involving some percent of the average pay for X% of someone’s Y highest earnings years) incentivized fraud and overspending. If you fix that, you could likely see more reasonable pension costs. An easy fix would be to just have OT pay not factor in this calculation and otherwise keep it the same. It’s pretty common to hear about police officers and firefighters supposedly working >80 hr/week for extended periods. I’m not saying it’s impossible for that to happen naturally, but I think it is greatly incentivized by pension calculations. The OT pay itself being time fraud isn’t a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but the fact the taxpayer has to pay it over and over again over potentially decades really makes it consequential and something we need to disincentivize (note I’m NOT suggesting we even get rid of OT. Just remove it from pension calculations). Another controversial statement: a lot of public jobs in CA pay a lot of money. I don’t think they necessarily need to have their pay cut but you could probably reduce the pension to like 40-50% of max income. Someone making $120k/yr has plenty of money to make other retirement contributions and still live well off an extra $50k+/yr. Healthy pensions are good to avoid destitution but $100k/yr pernsion is a lot of money…