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> It isn't legally possible to "just" take a pension away. Is that true? I simply point out the common TV trope of police officers, essentially, "trapped" wai

> It isn't legally possible to "just" take a pension away. Is that true? I simply point out the common TV trope of police officers, essentially, "trapped" waiting to, I guess, vest and get their pensions. They seem to use it a lot as a discipline incentive, for example. "Don't do that Hank, or you'll lose your pension!" etc. But I know my mother got a pension working for a company for only a few years, so I don't know how that all works. "It depends" I'm sure.

jerf 2y ago
"just", complete with scarequotes, is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that phrase. Once it is obtained you can't "just" take it away, legally. That doesn't mean there's no way to do it or that there's no legal way to do it, it's just not something you can "just" do. And it's not just legal. The solution to the US's debt problem isn't that you "just" stop paying Medicare and Social Security, because that causes its own problems. From a sufficiently cynical point of view, but one that still carries rather a lot of truth, Medicare and Social Security are payoffs for certain portions of the population to not riot, or induce other parts of the population to riot. The government can't "just" stop paying them.