As a taxpayer, I resent having to pay even more tax to bail out PERA and support retirees in comfortable pensions - often 2 per household.  People I know in PERA retired early, after just 20 years - often at age 55 and have collected full benefits.  Healthy people can expect to live to 75 and beyond.  So we are paying 20-30 years of overly generous benefits for these retirees with them collecting significantly more than was contributed for them.  A professor I know (PERA is not available to profs anymore) will get retirement at full salary - ~ $100K at age 65. What about government employees with their overly generous salaries and benefits? This is often a criticism of government - we pay for higher salaries and better benefits than they would get in the private sector. It galls this liberal taxpayer . They promised and gave away too much with PERA and now we, the taxpayer, get stuck paying the bill - again and again.