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Mich. Teacher Says New Bill Will Wreck Her Retirement Plans
SB1040: Testimony at a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee that teachers will have to wait to retire at 60 has provoked derision from taxpayers and businesses.
A Michigan English teacher at Saginaw Township Community School District is upset that she won’t be able to retire at 47 as she had previously planned if SB 1040, introduced by Senator Kahn last month and current in the Senate Appropriations Committee, becomes law. It will require public school employees to contribute a minimum of 5% of their compensation to their retirement plan and be 60 before receiving health care benefits. This means that instead of another 3 years of service the 44 year old teacher will have to work another 16 years in order to be eligible for health benefits.
Terri List was one of the critics of the bill highlighted by the Michigan Education Association.
“By the time I’m 60, I would have put in 43 years of service, earning a salary at the top of the pay scale. How does that save the district money? You could hire two people for the cost of one and encourage young people to join the profession. Right now, I would not recommend to my pupils to become a teacher in Michigan.”
Michael Van Beek of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy pointed out that Ms List’s math only made sense if she had bought ‘years of service’ instead of completing them all and that this practice is essentially extinct in the private sector.
Although many of the people testifying before the Senate Appropriations Retirement Subcommittee claimed that the proposed bill was unfair and an unjustified attack on school employee retirement benefits, many interested parties outside the profession were stunned by the criticisms. Leon Drolet, chairman of the Michigan Taxpayers Alliance said:
“Wow. They have reached the politicians’ level of entitlement,” Drolet said. “She thinks she is entitled to retire at 47? Holy smokes. I don’t know what more to say to that. A government employee thinking that 47 is a reasonable expectation to retire shows just how deep inside their own bubble they live, insulated from the real world.”
While Charles Owens, Michigan chapter president of the National Federation of Independent Businesses remarked that Ms List was indeed correct:
“If you want to retire if you are 47, apparently teaching is not the place to go,”
The Subcommittee meets again April 19th and the bill is said to be on the fast track with hopes of it being completed before June.
Thursday
April 19th, 2012
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Comments
I feel terrible that this person won’t get their full benefits are making that very important pit stop in the classroom. Who actually expects to retire at 47, and then complains when cooler heads prevail and stop them?
The way to fix this problem is not to go back 20 years with a little whiteout but to think about consequences before passing laws or signing contracts.
Why must public benefits be brought down to the level of the private sector? Why can’t private retirement benefits be brought up to the public sector? Right wing conservatives that are biasis against teachers spout proproganda that is not grounded in reality. I would like the business guy, or the head of the Michigan Tax payer association what they have taught in public schools.
The attack on public pensions is an attempt to transfer more money from the public sphere to the pockets of private individuals. Conservative Republicans want to take the retirement of hard working men and women and transfer it to the wealthy through tax breaks.
Why? Because they are unsustainable levels of benefits being paid by the taxpayers. She could live fifty years on the dole. Private pensions have been largely frozen, cut back or eliminated as a result of massive shortfalls in funding given the longevity of the beneficiaries. Do some research or math instead of your baseless political whining and you will see the reality of the situation.
While I certainly agree that private pensions have been cut back, frozen or eliminated, I certainly don’t agree with the reasons you give for that happening. Do the math? What an excellent idea. Tell me, do you seriously believe that life expectancy has gone up 13 years since since 1985? She will have worked for 43 years by the time she’s 60. That means she’s now been working for 27 years. Clearly, when she started, retiring at 47 with full pension wasn’t considered obscene, and yet it is now. The problem isn’t life expectancy, the problem are the taxpayers. The taxpayers aren’t paying enough tax. I want people like Mitt Romney to pay 30% in taxes on their income so this woman who’s taught all her life can retire after 27 years of service with her full health and pension. Like she was promised. The fact that somehow paying 15% on capital gains is noble but asking for what was promised is grasping and selfish. And, all this rhetoric about “taxpayers” aside, I think you are under a misapprehension that you are actually her boss. You’re not. You don’t “pay her salary,” you don’t get to actually decide if or when she’ll get paid, you don’t get to monitor how she spends her money and weigh in on the intelligence of her financial choices. It’s a nasty precedent to set, you know. Cause, it’s gonna get awkward when a childless neighbor next door comes over complaining cause your kid didn’t do his or her homework and possibly got a C on that last test and what a waste of their property tax money that is.
Just Mitt, or can Warren and Obama pay too? Warren out to try paying the 15% he avoids.
Obama just released his tax returns for last year. Why don’t you check what percentage in tax he paid.
She can still “retire” from teaching and receive her pension…she’ll just have to wait for her HEALTH coverage until age 60. There’s nothing that says she still can’t receive those benefits from a new employer, purchase coverage herself, or from a spouse.
[...] Latest Retirement Plan News April 20th, 2012 Latest Retirement Plan News (function() { var s = document.createElement("script"), s1 = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; s.type = "text/javascript"; s.async = true; s.src = "http://www.tipy.com/button.js"; s1.parentNode.insertBefore(s, s1); })(); Mich. Teacher Says New Bill Will Wreck Her Retirement Plans It will require public school employees to contribute a minimum of 5% of their compensation to their retirement plan and be 60 before receiving health care benefits. This means that instead of another 3 years of service the 44 year old teacher will … Read more on educationnews [...]