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Comment by megaman22 | Hacker News Reader

Well, cutting the top out of this seems like the obvious solution. Pants-on-head to give an Oregon coach who's been funded by Nike to collect a multimillion pension.

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It does seem reasonable that there would be a cap, but I wonder how much cutting the pensions of a few thousand highly paid retirees will impact the budget.

At the very least, someone should crunch the numbers and find out. It's anyone's guess how the ratios will skew until you measure them.

How to approach this fairly is a whole other can of worms; there will almost inevitably be some unjust outcomes.

The data is here: https://gov.oregonlive.com/pers/ (you can download a CSV).

There are 2,032 people making over $100,000 per year. The sum of their pensions is $252,144,041.04 per year. If each were capped at $100,000 per year that would be $203,200,000 per year, so a potential savings of $48,944,041.04

If we assume that the average pension of those with a pension over $100,000/year is $200,000 a year, and cut those down to a cap of $100,000/year it would be $200,000,000/year in pension reduction. With a $2.5 billion/year spend on PERS [0], that is not an insignificant amount on the entire burden of the pension system, even if it is off by an order of magnitude.

[0] http://www.pers.ms.gov/Content/Supplemental/persfacts_figure...

If you assume the average for those over $100k is $17 billion, capping it at $100k would save the entire budget many times over!

$200k is a completely arbitrary assumption. And if your cost savings are off by an order of magnitude, it is basically insignificant, at <1% of the budget.

If you can wave a wand and reduce benefits, targeting only the top 2000 is probably not the most effective use of your magic.

There is another key point to fixing the absurd top N% of pensions that are receiving large payouts: maybe it won't save the budget, however those funds can go toward paying for more pensions (eg in the bottom 50%) with the same capital outlay. The $100,000 you shave off a spiked pension at the top, might pay for four lower level pensions. In these types of scenarios, 5% and 10% optimizations are a big deal over the long-haul.

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