In March 2022, defined benefit pension plans are more prevalent for state and local government workers. Only 15 percent of private industry workers had access to a defined benefit plan, compared with 86 percent of state and local government workers.
According to the IRS job site, “All federal employees are automatically enrolled in one of the best retirement systems in the world.”
Let’s think about the rhetoric we hear. Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, Americans have little or no emergency savings and many can’t come up with even $400 if needed. Americans are not saving for retirement.
Hey, I don’t begrudge government workers their pensions, they do pay toward them in most cases, but still the bulk of funding comes from taxpayers … who do not have pensions and generally must fund their own retirement.
And no, government worker total compensation is not less than the private sector.
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
If you look up the Federal pension system for most civilian workers, it is social security plus 1% per year of high 3 average pay and a thrift plan basically same as a 401k. The pension is contributory.
If the tax code was favorable enough, most medium and large size corporations could do similar for their employees.
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15% of private sector workers have a pension these days down from a high of around 50%. It has nothing to do with tax code. It’s funding and accounting that impact earning and fluctuate. Federal has a COLA too and the full cost is far more than the employee contribution.
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It is an easy target, but then when I look at some government jobs like teachers, for example, for the most part I don’t feel like they are getting one over on the taxpayers at all. Government jobs is a very broad category, and there are extreme outliers on both sides, but part of that is simply the inefficiency of a relatively large organization, especially at the federal level. Just like some of the positions really defy most metrics to measure performance, such as teaching, intelligence community, etc.
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