The person that started this meme unfortunately has their facts wrong. Here is the accurate information:
• Members of Congress earn their $174,000 salaries only
during their elected terms. (Nope, not for life.)
• They’re eligible for congressional pensions only after
five years of service. (For a member of the House, that would mean getting
elected to office at least three times.)
Those pensions can’t be tapped until retirement age — and
can’t be collected while a lawmaker still gets a federal salary. So John Kerry,
for example, can’t collect his congressional pension while he serves as
secretary of state, according to Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union.
• The size of the pension depends on years of service and
the average of a lawmaker’s highest three years of salary. The exact formula
depends on when they started. Meanwhile, every paycheck, lawmakers contribute
to both their pensions and Social Security.
• Most congressional pensions are nowhere near a lawmaker’s
salary. Under a pre-1984 retirement formula, it couldn’t be more than 80
percent of a lawmaker’s final salary, not counting cost-of-living adjustments.
Under current rules, lawmakers could theoretically get more than 80 percent of
their salary, but most would need to serve more than 66 years to get that.
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