Lima Area CORE Members' Letter to the Editor in the Lima News

From John Curry, April 3, 2010

Letter: Ask the right questions about your retirement
Lima News, April 1, 2010
Elizabeth Ebbing and Shirlee Zerkel

Lima Retirement was meant to be a three-legged stool: Social Security, an employer-provided pension and personal savings. People’s 401(k)s never were intended to be the foundation of retirement, yet they have become that. It is simply corporate and Wall Street greed that has taken pensions.

There are truths about public pensions, the State Teachers Retirement System in particular, that the press never will tell you. By law, teachers fund their own pensions. Their pensions are deferred compensation acquired through negotiations. The school board’s contribution to STRS is part of that contract. The school board’s 14 percent contribution to STRS has not changed since 1984. Over the same time period, an individual teachers’ contribution rate has increased 42.9 percent to the current 10 percent of salary. Teachers fund their own retirement.

Until recently active teachers did not have the option of paying into Medicare. Consequently, about 10,000 retired teachers do not get Medicare Part A. STRS retirees have no spousal subsidy for health care. A retiree couple pays well over $1,000 a month for health care. STRS retirees fund 95% of their health care and yet the fund is running dry. It will be a crisis for Ohio’s taxpayers if nearly 170,000 retirees are added to the state’s Medicaid and welfare roles.

The real revolt will come when 30- to 40-year-old workers finally realize that with a 401(k) foundation, they never will be able to retire. It is time to ask the right questions so we all will be on the same side. Corporations and Wall Street will be on the other side, where they have always been.