(Promoted by Colorado Pols)
There’s a local angle on Obama’s comment last night that “some of the only people in America who are going to work the same job, in the same place, with a health and retirement package, for 30 years, are sitting in this chamber. For everyone else, especially folks in their forties and fifties, saving for retirement or bouncing back from job loss has gotten a lot tougher.”
The local connection was sitting in front of Obama in the form of Mike Coffman. He’s part of an even smaller number of people who’ve fought to abolish retirement packages, like the ones Members of Congress get, even though he’s receiving a $55,000 retirement package (from the state of Colorado) while, at the same time, drawing a $174,000 salary as a U.S. Congressman.
As the National Journal’s Shane Goldmacher reported in 2013 when Coffman was urging Members of Congress to give up their pensions:
If there’s one thing I learned in both the United States Army and the Marine Corps about leadership, it was leading by example,” Coffman lectured them, pointing to his chest at a committee hearing. “Never ask anyone to do anything that you yourself would not be willing to do.”
What Coffman left unsaid that day in a speech about his bill’s “symbolic” importance was that he was collecting a $55,547 state-government pension in addition to his congressional paycheck. Having spent two decades as an elected official in Colorado, he has received retirement benefits since 2009, the year he arrived in Congress.
But, Goldmacher asked Coffman later, doesn’t the Aurora Congressman realize he’s taking a defined-benefit pension, like the one he’s opposing?
“I am,” he told Goldmacher. “I am.”
At the time, I hoped reporters would ask Coffman directly, does Coffman see any hypocrisy in his own actions? And if so, what does he think he should do about it and why?
No one asked him, but it’s not too late.
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And they'll all be making $174,000 or more this year for sitting on their hands.
Coffman also, no doubt, receives a pension from Uncle Sam for his military service. Within his household, his wife is also set to receive PERA benefits when she retires. That said, hypocrisy is probably one of Coffman's lesser sins.
Coffman is a decorated combat veteran. Why do you disrespect him so much?
It is possible to be both a veteran and an idiot.
Major Major Major?
Let's see…John Kerry and Max Cleland are decorated combat veterans. Furthermore, they've both been injured in the line of duty. And…gee, you're right…Republicans have never disrespected either of them…at all.
Coffman's only injury was the amputation of his political morality.
Did he do a full 20 years in service? I'm pretty sure that's when retirement pay without disability starts. It used to be, anyway
yes. over 20 years as a CO state elected official.
I meant his military service. Unless things have changed, 20 years is when a retirement pension kicks in. I'm an airman's brat and my father stayed in 20 years so he would get retirement pay.