That is the pension check Philadelphia City Council President Anna Verna is scheduled to receive when she officially retires from civic duty. Seems like a good deal, right? Well not for Philadelphia tax payers. We all know that a pension is a percentage of your salary that's paid into a fund and when you retire that money is paid to you in a monthly check for the rest of your lifetime. Sounds fair, but the city of Philadelphia has two retire programs. One is the traditional program the other is called DROP. DROP gives a person of retiring age an option to schedule their retirement. Once they enroll in the DROP program they have to work for four years, theoretically train their replacement and then theoretically retire. Here's the catch. With the DROP program workers who enroll will receive their pension, while they are currently working the last four years. The pension money is put in a high-yielding interest account and after the four years they are issued a check for these money's. In Anna Verna's case, a $400,000 check. It seems ridiculous that they can receive retirement benefits while not retired. How is this possible? Does your job offer such wonderful benefits? I'm sure they don't. However, if you think this is bad, DROP participants have the option of retiring and coming back to work. Some worker retire on Friday, receive their check and come back to work on Monday! Receiving retirement benefits for four years. But what does this program cost you? The program has a fixed interest rate which means if the economy is doing well the program works but if economics aren't good the city is required to make payment to the pension fund to recover the difference. Last year, that amount was over $352 million. The DROP program was initially created to give the city an opportunity to plan for workers retirement and be able to bring in younger, lower waged replacements. It was also initially only for Police and Fire, those whose physical commitment to the city can't be marginalized with a dollar figure. You may think, only in Philadlephia can this be going on but this type of pension non-sense is going around throughout the country. And we wonder why our economy is terrible and our citys are all in debt.
