According to a self-described Park Ridge taxpayers’ watchdog organization, I’m living the life of Bill Gates.
Okay. Not quite.
But responding to what they call my roasting of Park Ridge board of education member Anthony Borelli, they did give me quite a raise in my teacher retirement pension.
See, Borelli is their hero because he voted against a pay raise for teachers. He campaigned for the board position promising to vote against ANY pay raise for teachers.
Only Borrelli and Uhlig voiced any concerns about the taxpayers, which promptly got Borrelli barbecued by retired D-64 teacher and PREA activist Fred Klonsky on his blog post. In Klonsky’s world, teachers will always be underpaid and underappreciated, even as he enjoys (at the ripe old age of 64?) his taxpayer-guaranteed defined-benefit pension after a mere 30 years of service that we understand will pay him 80% of his final years’ salary for the rest of his life.
Oh, to be one of those poor deprived and disrespected teachers!
Sorry watchdogs. But no teacher makes 80% of their salary as a pensioner.
A little Googling before writing about stuff you don’t know anything about might be useful.
Or do you know the truth and just prefer to make stuff up?
But read their post. See if the value of education is mentioned.
It’s not.
Update. The anonymous publishers of the anti-tax watchdog site have decided to go after me personally. They publish my salary which was public information anyway and is available on the Park Ridge Education Association’s own website. They then get every other piece of information wrong, including the amount my retirement pension. If facts were nickels, these guys wouldn’t have a dime.
Fred Klonsky 
Bill Moyer got it right..tea party pitting private middle class vs public middle class
Let’s see…the country is all a-Twitter over paying the NFL refs to end the strike ($150k or more for 6 months of part-time work–correct me if I’m mistaken–don’t want to be incorrect like the aforementioned watchdogs)–even Paul Ryan, Gov. Walker & Pres. Obama call for settlement–but everyone in the country is quibbling over teachers’ salaries & pensions?!
No further comment necessary, here.
I went to that site, read that ill-written (and poorly researched) post and wrote the following comment:
I think you’re forgetting a couple of very important facts here:
1. Teachers are taxpayers, too. In fact, some of us pay quite a bit in taxes. The past two years, I’ve had my savings wiped because of the exorbitant amount of taxes I’ve paid and I make a smaller salary than all of my friends with the same level of education in the private sector.
2. Teachers pay into their pensions in addition to the district. Pension problems are not about teachers wanting exorbitant amounts of money, but rather the constant mismanagement of money by the bureaucracies which exist to prevent that.
3. Teachers don’t receive social security. If you are for pension reform, then you should also be for social security reform, but my guess is you’re not. Frankly, they are the same thing. People pay into them, the government controls that money and invests it accordingly in order to pay out the recipient at the time of retirement.
4. Teachers do not have 401K programs. They can sign up for 403B programs, but there is no employee contribution because the understanding is that the pension is the retirement account. You don’t seem to have a problem with people having their employers contribute to 401Ks. That drains corporations of funds which could be used to hire people and have more jobs in a time in our economy when jobs are scarce. So why pick on public agencies contributing to and paying out on pensions?
I understand the need for reform, but it shouldn’t come in the form of punishment to teachers. Why does that teacher not deserve that amount of money in a yearly pension? Why should they suffer? Did they not work hard for that money over their career? Did they not pay their end of that retirement fund? You seem to just be disgusted by any public employee having a right to a comfortable retirement. We should care about all the citizens in this country and their workers’ rights…not just those who work in the private sector. Public employees are important to a society. They make it so that you are protected, you can have basic things such as a driver’s license, and your children are well educated. Public sector employees should not be punished in their old age as a result of choosing a career of service.
And quite frankly, even if that $72K figure was correct (and I don’t believe it is based on your shoddy research and poor mathematics based on assumption and not fact, and your initial reporting of incorrect facts), I don’t understand why that teacher doesn’t deserve that much money. Many people in the private sector make that type of salary, especially in the Chicagoland area. It is not exorbitant or undeserved.
Your dismissal of someone’s right to a perfectly fair, perhaps even a merited, salary in their retirement which comes from their retirement account is quite frankly part of the problem nowadays. We vilify the workers, in this case (and in this day and age in general) the teachers, but who we should be holding accountable are the politicians who have gotten us into these situations through their mismanagement of funds.