> Why not ask yourself what is stopping yourself from having those protections in the private industry

Easy: Reality. Read on if you care to understand.

> Maybe instead of punching down("everyone should have to live as bad as I do/did") you should be raising people up

You are looking at this from the wrong perspective. What some of these protected groups have is a fantasy, a Ponzi scheme, that is only sustainable because they can take money away from us by force through taxation.

In the real world, a company cannot give their employees lifetime pensions at 80% of their last salary. This is crazy, yet, this happens across a bunch of government and other tax-supported entities.

I am not saying that everyone should live as bad as I do. I don't have a bad life and such is the case for most people. What I (and tens of millions of others) don't have is a fantasy where magical money supports exorbitant pensions, medical plans and other benefits.

Here's a super simplified math experiment. This isn't meant to be a precise model of reality, just a thinking tool to start to ask the right questions.

You hire a 60 year old for a job (again, for simplification). Say you pay them $100K US for that job.

Their healthcare plan costs $25K per year, which you also pay.

Five years later this person retires. Because they are in a protected class, you have to keep paying for their healthcare and, say, 80% of their salary for the rest of their lives. Let's say this person lives to 90, so 25 years.

Well, you need to hire another person to fulfill that role. You go and hire another 60 year old for the same role (simplifying so we only wait 5 years for retirement.

You pay this person the same $100K and spend $25K on health insurance.

In reality, this role now costs you $180K per year in salary and $50K per year in healthcare.

Why?

Because you have to carry the first ex-employee for the rest of his/her life.

Five years later, the second employee retires. Same protected benefits and conditions.

You hire someone for the same role again.

Now the position costs you $260K per year, plus $75K per year in medical.

You are 10 years into this experiment and the entire thing is unsustainable at best. If you have the ability to do it, you are forced to either outsource (China), negotiate a sensible deal or close down the business (because you might have dozens, hundreds or thousands of employees under similar conditions.

The steady state for this is when the oldest employees die, the limit function, if you will. At that point the role will cost you approximately $420K per year in salary and $125K per year in healthcare premiums.

This, of course, assuming there is no inflation and costs remain flat for 25 years, which isn't going to be the case at all. Assuming 5% per year inflation/cost-of-living increases, the numbers at the end of 25 years are $466K and $138K.

You see, what happens is that people read a comment such as mine and don't invest one microsecond actually thinking things through, much less analyzing it. This isn't difficult math. And this has nothing to do with wanting people to live, as you put it, as bad as I do. What I want is for the people WE pay to live in the same reality WE do. In this reality, you'd go bankrupt if you owned a business, small, medium or large, that provided such insanely irresponsible benefit packages.

In other words, these people live in a taxpayer-funded fantasy. And this is wrong.

And that doesn't even cover the issue of incompetence. If you cannot fire people when they are found to be incompetent, you might have to hire two, three or more people just to be able to get that one job done. Now were are in the realm of that position potentially costing you millions of dollars per year. This is incredibly wrong.