First, the pensions of public servants are including when you calculate your total compensation. Second, the employees contribute, and it's not cheap. For most employees it ranges from 8% to 14% of their gross salary.
I agree that it sucks that few private employees receive pensions anymore. It's not that we should eliminate public sector pensions, it's that we need to mandate private sector pensions. Personally, I'd expand the CPP. It's objectively the best run pension fund in the world, posting amazing performance and when you consider that for the participants it's literally a risk-free investment, if I could have invested extra into it, I would. Crunch the numbers and there's no way an individual could come close to replicating the CPP in their own portfolio without taking on some pretty significant risk. And please don't bother saying that CPP is broke, because it's not, and it's a top performing pension fund. If Alberta withdraws from the CPP to create an APP inside AIMCO, they're the biggest morons that ever lived. AIMCO are amateur cowboys compared to the CPP managers, and based on recent events, I'm sure they'd flush a lot of the money away on failed derivative security strategies that are attempts to shore up results because they rarely exceed benchmarks.
Another reason to expand CPP is that employer based pensions are subject to abuse. Sears, anyone? We need to ensure that people can't lose the pension they invested in, and a large scale universal government run one does exactly that.
And yes, if the public sector is so golden and amazing, people are free to pursue careers there. Keep in mind that pretty any job with good job security, competitive pay and benefits and so on is usually in a professional capacity, so you'll need at least a degree (maybe several) and some form of designation. Envious of what a nurse earns? Well, nursing is a very difficult program to gain entry to, hard work to complete, and then the job itself is anything but easy.
I agree that it sucks that few private employees receive pensions anymore. It's not that we should eliminate public sector pensions, it's that we need to mandate private sector pensions. Personally, I'd expand the CPP. It's objectively the best run pension fund in the world, posting amazing performance and when you consider that for the participants it's literally a risk-free investment, if I could have invested extra into it, I would. Crunch the numbers and there's no way an individual could come close to replicating the CPP in their own portfolio without taking on some pretty significant risk. And please don't bother saying that CPP is broke, because it's not, and it's a top performing pension fund. If Alberta withdraws from the CPP to create an APP inside AIMCO, they're the biggest morons that ever lived. AIMCO are amateur cowboys compared to the CPP managers, and based on recent events, I'm sure they'd flush a lot of the money away on failed derivative security strategies that are attempts to shore up results because they rarely exceed benchmarks.
Another reason to expand CPP is that employer based pensions are subject to abuse. Sears, anyone? We need to ensure that people can't lose the pension they invested in, and a large scale universal government run one does exactly that.
And yes, if the public sector is so golden and amazing, people are free to pursue careers there. Keep in mind that pretty any job with good job security, competitive pay and benefits and so on is usually in a professional capacity, so you'll need at least a degree (maybe several) and some form of designation. Envious of what a nurse earns? Well, nursing is a very difficult program to gain entry to, hard work to complete, and then the job itself is anything but easy.