Taxpayers shouldn’t shoulder the salaries of retirees

After 45 years of work minus numerous years of unemployment, I receive social security at a mere 25% of what was my highest year’s salary. This, however, is not how the widest used source of senior income is determined. Last highest year’s earnings is how government pensions are computed. Not fortunate enough to have a generous employer that offered a pension, the above is from social security alone. My ending salary was $45 per hour with a college degree and decades of experience. To think, the Democrats want to give fast food servers a third of that just because.

I’ll express my disgust and overwhelming offense taken to how our overlords of government parrot their incessant demand to reward themselves, hiding behind ludicrous contractual expectations. How dare you all feel entitled to pensions at our expense? Cancel the way of ensuring your lifestyles through sales tax increases or pension obligation bonds. Don’t try to infer that those taxes will go for other things. You all play a good shill game! Confuse everyone and in the dark of night pass the bill to us.

Pay your own way through vastly reduced salaries and fringe benefits. Chico’s 100,000 plus citizens, mostly of modest means, should not have to shoulder your lifestyles. If median income figures are accurate, you will be burdening the least of us so that you may bask in the sun, in the most regressive way imaginable. And to think, Andrew Coolidge, my representative, is in the forefront of this debacle.

— Joe Azzarito, Chico