Edward Glaeser makes an often neglected point in Bloomberg View:
The problem with public pensions isn’t that teachers or firefighters or police officers are overcompensated. These are tough jobs. The problem is that public workers get too little of their pay while they work and too much when they retire. According to a new paper by Maria Fitzpatrick of Stanford University: “Schools and other public sector employers contribute nearly three times as much per hour worked to the pension benefits of their employees as their counterparts in the private sector.”
Many public workers would vastly prefer to get more money today in exchange for lower pension payments, Fitzpatrick finds in the study, “How Much Do Public School Teachers Value Their Retirement Benefits?”
I would dispute this in part: it is certainly fair to say that some teachers, firefighters, and police officers are overcompensated while others are undercompensated, but Glaeser’s basic point, that the timing of compensation is badly skewed, is an important one.