Note to Greg Hinz. Mayor Johnson was a teacher and knows pensions are deferred income, not a gift.

I’m pretty confident that Chicago’s Mayor Johnson knows that public employee pensions are not a gift.

He knows the problem is not that pensions are too generous.

In spite of the misnomer that the pension increases of 3% each year are cost of living increases or a COLA, they are not. Without a yearly increase a retired public worker would have the same pension in the 20th year of retirement as they did the first year.

Nobody could live on that.

Unlike the yearly increases in Social Security, our increases are locked in at 3% and not tied at all to inflation or the cost of living.

Teacher salaries are notoriously low. Some estimate that someone in the private sector earns as much as 25% more than a teacher with comparable degrees and experience.

So for a teacher who manages to stay in the profession as a career, and most do not, a good pension is part of the compensation package.

As a teacher and union organizer I know Mayor Johnson knows all this.

Which is why I find Greg Hinz’s question and the column that follows it in today’s Crain’s Chicago Business so wrong-headed.

“Are taxpayers getting their money's worth on pensions?”

Of course, Hinz’ implication is that we are not.

I will add as I always do that teacher pensions in Illinois and Chicago are pretty good. Every worker should receive a retirement benefit that offers a life of relative comfort after a life-time of work.

Most of America’s retirees do not.

Taxpayers, which include public employees and teachers by the way, are getting their money’s worth because without pensions the current teacher shortage would be even worse without it.

And our public schools, students and families would be the victims.

It was Mayor Daley (2) that created the Chicago public pension fund debt, just as the state’s Democratic and Republican legislators created it at the state level when they failed to meet the state’s obligation to fund their pensions.

Even Hinz is forced to suggest that it is pretty disingenuous of Dana Levenson, who served as Chicago’s CFO in the Richard M. Daley administration, to write“Something is rotten with the city of Chicago’s pension funds,” for Forbes, suggesting that additional pension payments “may have been a classic case of throwing good money after bad,”

The solution being to cut retirement benefits.

But being disingenuous himself, Hinz states that compared to Daley, Mayor Rahm Emanuel met the city’s pension obligations.

While it is true that Rahm was forced to address the pension debt in his final years as mayor, he ran for Mayor on a platform of cutting pension benefits.

Rahm told the Chicago Tribune:

“Think about it. What kind of progressive, sustainable system guarantees retirees 3 percent annual compounded pay increases when inflation has been at basically zero and current employees have at times been furloughed, laid off, or received 1 percent raises?

“There is nothing progressive about 3 percent compounded raises for retirees and furloughs for workers. The mantle of progressivity must not just be more taxes on the wealthy, it must be more respect for our workers’ paychecks. I applaud our labor unions for being willing to fix this inequity in 2012 with me.”

It was not until Lori Lightfoot that real movement took place in attempting to reduce the public pension debt.

Solving the problem of the city’s public pension debt won’t be easy.

There will be pressure on Mayor Johnson to see the problem as being too generous a benefit and the solution as cutting those benefits.

But Brandon was a teacher and union organizer so he knows this was never an issue of generous benefits. It was always an issue of underfunding.