So if you're putting money into a system, and you know it's not enough to cover your benefits, you're not exactly just a innocent victim here. You're benefitting from a system that you know is broken.
The money did exist. Workers pay into the pensions as part of their compensation package.
Chicago borrowed against the actual pension accounts and corruption/incompetence drained them. Then they did scoop and throw methods for two decades to avoid having the pensions land on their heads.
There is a ton or corruption in Chicago. I have a friend who works for Idot. They have a lot of workers on the payroll who are making 6 figures. My friend has never seen these people who are supposed to be his co-workers show up for work, and when he asked he was told "Don't bring it up. Over your head. We can't fire them."
Firstly pension funds are conservative in their estimates, they aren’t growth funds.
And what precisely is anyone supposed to do? NOT put money into a fund ?
The only option other than a pension plan is to put it in a more risky fund. Which means your investment would be blown out post 2008.
AND that means your benefit from that job changes, making it less likely for you to join a government job -at all.
There’s a huge amount of discussion here that seems to have nothing to do with pension funds, but some bizarre form of fund which you should be blamed for partaking or being a dependent of through your job.
One is a fund you pay into and at the end you get whatever it's worth.
The other is a scheme you pay into which guarantees a set payout at the end. It's that which often causes problems, because the scheme has promised payouts that significantly exceed their investments if they have assumed greater growth than they get.
Not really.