In Pennsylvania retired teacher pensions leaves them impoverished.

There are 99 problems facing Illinois teacher pensions but a yearly cost of living increase ain’t one.

Oh, sure. I wish it were like Social Security which ties the yearly increase to inflation.

And I wish our pension systems weren’t only 40% funded due to the failure of the legislature to meet their legal obligations to pay what they owe for decades and decades.

And I wish those of us who paid into Social Security would receive what we earned.

But as my mother use to say, “If wishes were fishes we would have some to fry.”

There’s plenty of other Illinois pension issues which I have written about for over 15 years.

But the good news is that in spite of Democratic and Republican efforts to cut our benefits we fought back and got the Illinois Supreme Court to rule that our pension benefits were constitutionally and contractually protected and could not be diminished or impaired.

I can remember sitting next to a state representative a dozen years ago at a union luncheon in which she said that the only way to fix our pension debt was to do away with our annual 3% compounded COLA.

“That’s theft,” I told her.

She never ran for office again.

Not that I’m personally responsible for that.

I’m reading about retired teachers in Pennsylvania and I’m feeling lucky, if not angry.

Pennsylvania is one of just ten states that offers no cost of living increase to its public worker employees.

Enrollees in Pennsylvania’s two public sector pension funds — the State Employees’ Retirement System (SERS) and the Public School Employees’ Retirement System (PSERS) — haven’t seen a cost of living adjustment, or COLA, since 2004. Nearly 40 other states grant some sort of COLA to retirees.

Particularly hard hit by this lack of a COLA are the almost 69,000 former public school teachers, state government workers, and other public sector employees who retired before 2001, like McVay. On average, these retirees are in their early 80s.

They retired before the legislature increased pension benefits by 25%. The average pension for a SERS enrollee who retired before 2001 is under $15,000 annually, according to the system. That number for a 2022 retiree is more than $30,000, thanks to the increase as well as a rise in average salaries for workers.

There’s a similar gap for PSERS enrollees. A person who worked for 30 years and ended with a $30,000 salary would have a pension of $18,000 if they retired pre-2001, according to Chris Lilienthal, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania State Education Association. Under the same circumstances, a person who retired post-2001 would have a pension of $22,500.

Meanwhile the Pennsylvania pension systems have been the target of FBI investigations for questionable investments.

I’m envisioning an 80-year old retired Philly teacher (think Abbot Elementary) trying to live on the same pension unchanged from what they received when they retired over 20 years ago.

It’s just criminal.