While I understand what you are saying and agree with most, again I find state by state comparisons in the end meaningless.
I quoted the cost of living from the USA Today article that I posted above. Here's a site that claims that New York is 31% more expensive than Florida. https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/miami/new-york-city Although, honestly, it's hard to put a number on it because there are just so many factors. If I was moving from a ranch in Montana to New York City, I would expect to give up some personal space. And then there are other things that really affect quality of life that you can't really put a number on. For example, I could save a significant amount of money every year by moving across the river to Vancouver, Washington. I would no longer pay the Oregon state income tax on investments / capital gains. However, I would have to put up with or work around a horrible commute. So that's one factor that affects standard of living that is hard to quantify. As far as headline numbers, ok, show me the police officer from rural Maine, Idaho, Alaska or any other small town with a quarter-million a year pension. Btw, I have a lot of respect for police and firemen. If someone is willing to risk taking a bullet or burning in a building, they deserve something extra for taking that risk. As far as physically demanding jobs where life depends on fitness and reflexes, that's actually a good thing. Sitting at a desk all day is far worse for one's health than getting exercise through work.
CA produces 15% of the country's GDP with 10% of the country's population, has since the 1950s. So an average Californian is contributing 50% more to GDP than your average American. It might cost a little more to produce that GDP? Also very high cost of living, same as NY.
Alaska doesn't have retiree pay by individual in a public database but they do have current city and state employee pay at http://payroll.alaskapolicyforum.org/ Select "Municipality of Anchorage" and sort by total benefits. You'll see the top guy (Graham, Jeffrey) is a firefighter making $701,476! The next two guys, "senior patrol officers" making $450,304 and $428,304 respectively. I'm willing to bet each of those salaries that all three of those guys were in their terminal years and if you take their retirement formula they'll be getting a quarter-million a year pension. What do you say? Bottom line is I agree with you that quarter-million a year pensions are crazy, it's just that it's not a "liberal state problem", its ubiquitous to those high overtime jobs and somewhat inexcusable that it's still going on pretty much everywhere. And again, comparing rural Maine to NYC is absurd but as I mentioned it's seemingly impossible to impress cost of living deltas on people who haven't actually experienced them at full strength first hand, and I include myself in those who had to experience it to really get it. Another important "you'll never really grasp it until you experience it" thing is the impact of age on strength, endurance, and reflexes. I couldn't agree with you more, staying fit and active is crucial as you age, it's why I still run 5 miles a day and lift and play racquetball and tennis several times a week as well as hiking, biking, kayaking, paddleboarding... in my late 40s, as I have my whole life. But the inescapable reality is that for a given amount of training, fitness, diet, and sleep when I was 25 I'm down a somewhat significant amount in results now. Where before I could easily maintain 6 minute miles, I'm now pretty happy to maintain 7:30s, and I actually get more sleep, better diet, and a more consistent training schedule now. I don't lift as much, I can't get those impossible shots I once could...it's just a fact of life. And of course that ignores all the minor or major injuries that such a life piles on for all that time, many of which never 100% heal. And I'm not even 50 yet! Certainly there are folks who turn in amazing results in their 50s or 60s, they're either exceptions or they could have done much more if they'd applied themselves when younger. But in general, a 59 year old has no business running through back yards chasing a suspect who they may have to draw on around a blind corner at the end of the chase, or carrying charged fire hoses up a bunch of flights of stairs wearing an SCBA and carrying unconscious victims back out unless they're one of the fortunate exceptions to normal aging and want to. Frankly it's insulting to assert that allowing them to retire at 50 is somehow unfair and they're getting something they don't deserve, but again I think it comes from a place of naivety so hopefully pointing that out causes you to stop and think about that bit of your thought process just a bit which is all I ask. Again, bottom line is that retiring at 50 from those kind of jobs isn't a "liberal state" thing, it's just a cost of doing business and the "liberal states" just have a longer tail of these kind of pensions that FL too will eventually have.
I agree with you on the Alaska firefighter. Over $700k in earnings is crazy for a firefighter. They should have been able to hire at least 7 experienced firefighters for that wage. Anyhow, at least Florida and Texas look better managed as far as I can tell: https://salaries.myflorida.com/ On the Florida highest paid employees list, I see only medical and judicial above $200k (salary). For orange county (Orlando, Florida) which includes police and fire, I only see two people above $200k: https://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/news/2019/03/31/public-paychecks-here-are-orange-county.html So still about half what the 5 firefighters in San Jose were making. Yes, cost of living is a lot higher in San Jose than Orlando, but does $400k+ really equate to $211k in Orlando? I don't think so. A company would not double one's salary for relocating from Orlando to San Jose. Similar story with Texas: https://salaries.texastribune.org/ Highest paid people are all medical-related at the state level. For Dallas County, I don't see any police or fire making above $225k compensation: https://salaries.texastribune.org/dallas/ Interestingly, the 2nd highest compensated person manages the employee retirement fund. Second point, why does government still pay pensions? They should be offering a 401k with match just like the private sector. Third point, why assume that the pension should provide enough to live in the area where the employee worked? Why assume that a police officer who worked for 25 years in Beverly Hills should be entitled to an indefinite, never-ending stream of income (which ultimately comes from his neighbors, other tax payers) to allow him to continue living there for the rest of his life? That's the big issue that I have with California property taxes. People living there get grandfathered in on property tax rates far below the current rate for new homeowners. Effectively, they end up getting subsidized by new homeowners who are more likely contributing more to GDP than the natives. I don't have any issue with someone retiring at 50. It's actually my goal. I do have an issue with the expectation that at 50, some people become completely worthless from a productivity point of view and are not able to work for the rest of their lives. While I agree that 50 is probably too old to be chasing criminals through back yards, it's not too old to be a corporate security guard or mail carrier. Btw, since you are interested in health and longevity, you might find this interesting:
So first off you do a great job of looking up data and using it, so man after my own heart, and you are so very much like an earlier version of me I can't help liking you. With that in mind, I'll try one last time to emphasize the mind blowing nature of cost of living. My first company was headquartered in San Francisco. We literally paid twice as much to employees working there as elsewhere in the country doing similar jobs. So while I don't know about firefighters, I do know in the tech field (admittedly not exactly like for like) it is not at all unusual to pay someone double in San Jose what you pay them in Austin or Salt Lake City or Boise, to name a few lower cost places that still have good tech talent. As far as why governments still pay pensions, in many cases they don't. The federal govt, for example, moved to a hybrid system for civilian employees in the late 80s that's mostly a 401K (Thrift Savings Plan) with just a small pension. But guys like my dad who started working in 1970, as well as everyone who started over the next 18 years and those from before him, are under the old plan and will be for decades and they make up the majority of current retiree dollars. And absent a bankruptcy you can't just say screw you to the people you agreed to give a pension to and take it away, it's that long tail I've been talking about so much. Certainly police and fire unions are strong so they often still have pensions, on the other hand I know that when I lived in NW Florida they were perpetually understaffed and couldn't recruit enough people to be cops, and the guys who were cops almost all had to work second jobs to feed their families, so at some level its a supply and demand think like salaries and benefits for any job. Keeping in mind my original thought, so I'm not trying to be a dick here, but I think you may not realize how deeply insulting it is to effectively tell someone "thanks for putting your life on the line for the last 25 years to defend the folks here in Beverly Hills, now fuck off to a cheaper place to live and get a second job as a mall cop". I doubt that's how you really feel, but it's certainly the effect of your position on the subject and certainly how it's perceived. And it's actually a very different thing from CA Prop 13 which I completely agree with you is an abomination. With Prop 13 you had a homeowner with a house they bought for $10K now worth $1,010,000 and they don't want to pay tax on that whole value. Absent Prop 13 they cry that they're "forced to move", but that's bullshit. They now have $1M in windfall profit, worst case they can reverse mortgage $800K out of it which will be enough to pay taxes for the rest of their life, and their kids still get $200K in windfall profit in the end. The Beverly Hills cop, on the other hand, doesn't have that option. He's got no windfall profit, and setting them all up to have to move when they retire is neither fair nor would I argue is it good business practice for recruiting and retention of your current workforce. On a tangent, thanks for the Dr. Sinclair link. I've actually done a good bit of personal research into NAD from a science interest viewpoint and Elysium from an entrepreneur's viewpoint. From a science standpoint, my personal, non-expert belief is that there's almost an unbreakable relationship between reducing aging and increasing susceptibility to cancer when it comes to anything beyond exercise. Basically ageing mechanisms are the same mechanisms that stop uncontrolled cell reproduction, and so far none of the anti-aging research really seems to be acknowledging that and attacking the issue in tandem. NAD research is a poster child of that, there's research to show it does increase cancer risk and instead of embracing that and working to reduce it while still maintaining the benefits the NAD folks just try to attack the cancer research as unsound. Which leads to the business side of it. At this point Sinclair has enough invested in Elysium, both monetarily and professionally, that I think he's lost his objectivity. Lesson to be learned there is that bringing experts into your startup brings you credibility but at some point you can cause them to lose theirs. Giant caveat here though that I'm purely an amateur at this and would gladly let my opinions be shaped by those with more firsthand and deeper experience.
Thanks Sig. You can go on glassdoor.com and look up many big tech companies with offices in Silicon Valley and other places, select salary data, software engineer or other type of job with a large sample of people, and get a general idea of what premium large companies have to pay people to get them to live in one area vs. another. For example, if I select Facebook, San Jose, CA, Software Engineer V, total comp is $197K across 60 salaries. Change location to Seattle, WA, total comp for the same job - Software Engineer V is $205k although only 10 samples. Still, average is higher in Seattle compared to San Jose. Let's try Microsoft. Senior Software Development Engineer, San Jose, 152 salaries, average $166K total comp. Same job title, Seattle, 1630 salaries, average comp $177K. Intel Corp, Senior Software Engineer, San Jose, 87 salaries, average comp $151K. Same job title, Phoenix, AZ - $121K. Austin, Texas, although only 6 salaries, $151K. Portland, Oregon 140 salaries, average total comp - $135K. Anyhow, as you can see, if it was really the case that the cost of living was 2X in San Jose compared to those other places, every software engineer in San Jose would be desperately trying to take the same job at the same company in one of the other cities. As far as being forced to move...the public sector makes no assumptions and provides no guarantees as to the quality of life the worker will enjoy after retirement. That falls purely on them. And taking an other job after retirement doesn't necessarily mean it has to suck. For example, you were a fighter pilot. Maybe at 40 you are too old to fly in combat, but were you too old to teach other aspiring pilots how to fly? I guess the solution to all this is get rid of the pension and simply pay a salary high enough to attract the right talent. Investment / retirement, all on the individual just like in most of the public sector (although I think UPS and maybe Boeing still provide some kind of pension...could be wrong on that). I think the area of aging research that you are referring to is apoptosis. There's a branch of the SENS approach that targets that: https://www.sens.org/our-research/intro-to-sens-research/ although I am not sure how much progress they have made recently. I donated to SENS about a decade ago, but have not really followed their research closely since then. I don't really have enough knowledge about biology to assess the viability of their approach, but appreciate that they are at least promoting interest in the field and optimistic that their work will lead to some real results in the lab. Another blog that I occasionally follow is fightaging.org. In fact, just today Reason (the guy who publishes the blog) posted an article about cancer mortality rates falling and optimism about immunotherapies continuing to make steady progress. So over time, I think we will gain tools to better fight cancer.
I'd like to throw in a point that AFAIK nobody in this country retires at 50 (getting their pension check starting at age 50 that is) from a gubmint civil service type job. Out on disability at any age maybe but not just plain old retired.
Cons: Great move by orange Messiah in redistributing the wealth of those high income blue states onto welfare leeches in red states. Also cons: Take that socialists!