Even the $17/Week Co-Share: A Portrait of Greed

Exclusively, it appears, courtesy WPRO.

Christopher Cardarelli earned $77,000 as a firefighter last year and collected a $37,000 pension as a retired police captain but now he says he is paying too much for health benefits. ...

Cardarelli asserts that the city must reimburse him the $17 dollars a week he has been paying toward his health care because his contract says that if a retired cop is rehired then his town-financed healthcare is suspended, however, it says that the city will reimburse the retiree for any health care payments they are required to make by their new employer.

In addition to the matter of Mr. Cardarelli's unwillingness to pay a healthcare co-share that most of us can only dream about (Paul & Al made him the subject this morning of their "This Is Why You Suck" segment), this also becomes an excellent opportunity to once again highlight the extreme generosity of Rhode Island's public pension benefits: prima facie, Mr. Cardarelli is not ready to retire, nor does he need a pension to survive: he currently works a nice public sector job for North Providence.

Why, then, was he, along with thousands of other public employees, state and local, permitted to begin collecting a pension long before retirement age? And how can the bill on Smith Hill just voted out of committee honestly be framed as adequately reforming the pension system if it leave largely untouched these exceedingly generous pensions?