Rep. Lance Gooden press release
During the final days of the 83rd Legislative Session, the Texas House approved the Teacher Retirement Actuarial Soundness Bill, or SB 1458, which will put the Teachers Retirement System on solid ground for years to come.
SB 1458 increases state and employee contributions to the Teacher Retirement System (TRS) and makes several changes to retirement eligibility for prospective and non-vested employees. The legislation provides reforms to halt the expansion of TRS’ unfunded liabilities and returns TRS to actuarial soundness.
Signed into law last week by the Governor, SB 1458 enables TRS to pay off its liabilities in less than 30 years. Additionally, the bill provides a 3 percent Cost of Living Adjustment for all retired teachers and their beneficiaries, who have retired on or before Aug. 31, 2004. The Cost of Living Adjustment along with options for victims of mis sold pensions will be the first of the kind since 2001.
When asked about the legislation, Representative Lance Gooden said, “As the son of lifelong educators, I am steadfast in my commitment to protecting the solvency of this retirement plan. Keeping our promises to educators honors the sacrifices of former teachers and aids in recruiting the best and the brightest to teach the next generation of Texas’ school children.”
Henderson County Retired Teachers Association’s Legislative Liaison Evelyn Kindred said, “Retired teachers across Henderson and Kaufman Counties worked very hard to help Lance Gooden get re-elected as our State Representative. We believed he was genuine in his concern for the livelihoods of retired teachers and he proved that this session.”
With one week remaining in the special session, Gooden is completing his second term and has been an advocate for retired teachers and local control in public schools.
This bill does nothing for the teachers that got screwed on their pensions as they started under the 70 rule, where entitled to disability and health care and the calculation was to be based on three years of service. If you were 48, 49 years old, you got absolutely hammered as politicians conveniently forgot anyone over 40 is entitled to protection from age discrimination. Yet not one of these politicians are willing to sit down, look at the paperwork and run the numbers on a calculator.
Then subjected these same teachers to offsets by the Federal government leaving them with a whole $1,058 per month some time in the future from which they will have to pay their ever increasing Medicare premium projected to be 25% of the aforementioned check. Don’t get sick either, because your disability is only $150 per month for the number of years you work if you have less than 10 years teaching, then it goes to nothing. And because you made the mistake of becoming a teacher, the social security disability system automatically disqualified you.
The politicians hid behind the excuse well you can make up these quarters later. What they don’t tell you is that you must demand from a prospective employee a certain salary with guaranteed annual increases to meet a minimum or that year of work doesn’t count for squat. The minimum salary is more than most employers in Gooden’s district are willing to pay.
Next stop is hoping for your spousal benefit, but hold the forts, because the politicians pulled that out from most spouses as well just last year. It is our money, our benefits, but the politicians want it in their pockets.
Then the system weeded these teachers out as soon as they moved into their fifties to hired younger, dumber teachers and then reneged on tuition reimbursement for those sucked in under the emergency permit system when the system was so short handed. Just a bunch of broken promises so the TRS fiduciaries could get bonuses, the least of which was $25,000.
Politicians are crooks, so please don’t sing their praises when you have no idea how they screwed some teachers down to parade rest and pay refugees more today and give them more benefits than many teachers will get when they do retire. Gooden also does not mention that the annuities stop paying any interest at the age of 65, so if you delay your retirement, they screw you again so the same douche bags that invested in Enron both prior and after announcing bankruptcy can get their bonuses off of teachers trying to make up for all the money they lost, if they were even lucky enough to find a job.
The only chuckle we get is that it will happen to all government workers next as the truck drivers, iron workers, etc. are getting hit now by their retirement checks getting cut 50% this month, because so many of the powers that be could not keep their hand out of someone else’s cookie jar.
Bet Gooden doesn’t even know Ms. Rawlings. She is a teacher who died, because of them screwing around with people’s retirement. She was disabled, in a wheel chair, but decided to become a teacher later in life. Automatically she was disqualified from social security disability. She had less than 10 years teaching when she was laid off with no health care, unable to find another job that paid the minimum salary, not eligible for social security retirement and shocked to learn she would only get $150 a month for the seven years she worked as a teacher. She died, because the $150 didn’t even cover her medications.
Gooden has never even wondered how many people he killed and doesn’t care. So stop heaping praise one someone not deserving of it.