|
?:reviewBody
|
-
This piece about Congressional pensions and Social Security contributions has been circulating in various forms since at least April 2000: (In May 2001 someone combined the Congressmen don't pay into Social Security alerts with an existing screed about the Clintons' charging the Secret Service rent.) Virtually all of it is outdated, inaccurate, or misleading: It is true that, if current pension levels and cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) for Congress members continue to apply in the future, some former members of Congress could conceivably collect millions of dollars in annuities over the course of their lifetimes. However, the huge dollar amounts bandied about in e-mails like the ones quoted above are based upon extreme cases: those of politicians who entered Congress at relatively early ages, served for several decades, and retired while still young enough to potentially live for another several decades. These cases are the rare exceptions, based upon the hypothetical assumption that a few long-serving members of Congress who retired while in their mid-50s would live well past the age of 80. (Even the person who collects a modest salary/pension of $40,000 per year stands to take in a million dollars over the course of 25 years.) As of 2007, the average annuities for retired members of Congress were $63,696 for those who retired under CSRS and $36,732 for those who retired under FERS. Those figures are quite good (about 2-3 times more generous than what a similarly-salaried executive could expect to receive upon retiring from the private sector, according to the National Taxpayers Union), but not quite the lavish endowments these e-mails make them out to be. Additional information: Congressional Pensions(C-SPAN) Retirement Benefits for Members of Congress (United States Senate) Retirement Benefits for Members of Congress
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}