One of my mothers friends, who is now in her 80's, has been retired on a pension for over 40 years. She started working for her municipality right out of high school at 18, and worked 25 years as a clerk to get a full pension. Retired at 43(!) with 75% final pay (annually adjusted) and lifelong medical benefits.
Its totally insane and completely unsustainable. Back in the day people usually keeled over at 65 and the US was viewed as having achieved infinite growth forever, so perhaps back then it was a reasonable but generous offer. Today however it's just straight up corruption and waste to offer benefits like that.
I don’t think that retired fire chief’s (or school teachers') retirement is what’s wrong: what’s wrong is that most of us will not have a retirement that good. Why is that? It is possible to answer that question without tearing down someone else’s situation.
Everyone who gives a company years of their life should be able to comfortably retire after decades of service, but companies have managed to convince workers that most of them should work until the day they die and only a small precious few deserve to retire and finally be allowed to spend time with their loved ones.
1) that guy gets your labor, for decades. 4 decades to be exact
2) for less than you'll get for that work
(that's what getting a higher pension actually means in the real world, with money being an abstraction and all that)
3) he (or she) doesn't get more because they worked harder or better, but because they were working when a random political vote needed to be made (paid for, really). And that, not only won't repeat, but there's absolutely nothing you can do to change the situation to your benefit, even just to equalize. That last part is of course what makes taking away their benefits attractive.
Sounds pretty unfair to me. At least with a CEO they did something to get what they got, and there is a way to get their position, even if most will never achieve that.
So how would that work? The children that would need to provide that labor for me when I'm 65 would have to have been born already (they start work at, say, 20 years old). This has already happened, therefore, and cannot be fixed.
... which is of course another argument to take the pension away ... after all that's the only way to make it fair. You can play games with money, but money is an abstraction. You cannot raise up the necessary amount of people, the amount of people politicians promised us in trade for votes. It's not a matter of priorities anymore either, we're past the point where using 100% of the labor force would work.