Rick Perry, Pensioner. That’s the title of a Wall Street Journal article by Nathan Koppel discussing the fact that the Texas Governor has opted to start collecting on a state employee retirement annuity despite still holding the job of Governor, a fact which his opponents have already seized upon after the Perry campaign disclosed the information in Mr. Perry’s latest filing with federal election regulators.
Texas Democratic Party spokesman Anthony Gutierrez called the benefit “unconscionable” when state budget cuts have cost thousands of teachers their jobs. “If Perry wants retirement benefits,” Mr. Gutierrez said, “he should do us all a favor and actually retire.”
Further detail on why exactly this is a juicy topic for Perrys opponents:
Rick Perry has done something his opponents have been hoping he’d do for years: retire. But it’s not what the governor’s detractors had in mind.
Perry officially retired in January so he could start collecting his lucrative pension benefits early, but he still gets to collect his salary — and has in turn dramatically boosted his take-home pay.
Perry makes a $150,000 annual gross salary as Texas governor. Now, thanks to his early retirement, Perry, 61, gets a monthly retirement annuity of $7,698 before taxes, or $6,588 net. That raises his gross annual salary to more than $240,000.
Perry was asked about this from a reporter and gave the following response:
The LA Times also notes that Perry has a student loan:
Perry has proposed slashing congressional salaries and has repeatedly called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.”
In an interview with ABC News, Perry defended drawing early on his pension: “I think it’d be rather foolish to not access what you’ve earned.”
“That’s been in place for decades and I bought my military time and then obviously the 25 years of public service time, so as you reach that age you become eligible for it, so I don’t find that to be, you know, out of the ordinary,” he said.
Also in his disclosure report, Perry listed assets, including some land, a life insurance policy and investment funds, worth between $1.16 million and $2.4 million.
His only liability is a 2006 student loan for between $100,000 and $250,000 with an interest rate of 3.875%. A second student loan with a higher interest rate – 8.25% — was paid in full earlier this year.
Sullivan said the loan was used to send Perry’s son Griffin to Vanderbilt.
Until August, Perry held a number of stocks and municipal bonds in a blind trust. Perry liquidated the trust when he declared his candidacy for president because it did not qualify as a federal blind trust.
The holdings “have been largely liquidated into cash or cash equivalents,” Sullivan said.
The conservative blog Hot Air writes:
He “retired” back in January, months before he decided to run for president. Had he known he was going to jump in and take withering fire from Romney on his entitlements rhetoric, I assume he’d have waited to start collecting. But it is what it is, and it’ll be thrown in his face every time the subject of Medicare or Social Security reform comes up. I don’t blame him for his logic: He paid in, he worked hard, he followed the rules, and now he wants his money. Problem is, that’s the same attitude seniors take towards federal entitlements, and if Perry beats Obama, he’ll suddenly be the guy tasked with convincing them to relax that attitude a bit in the name of our common fiscal good. How does he rally them to take one for the team and wait until, say, age 68 to enroll in Medicare if he couldn’t wait until finishing his term as governor to start taking his own pension? When I tweeted that a few hours ago, Perry fans jumped on me by answering that Democrats will smear him and attack the GOP viciously no matter what. Which is true, but how does that mitigate the potential damage here? An enemy armed with artillery is more dangerous than an enemy armed only with rifles, and this represents a bit of artillery for them insofar as they’ll use it to try to galvanize resentment against Perry’s supposed hypocrisy. Why do you think Gingrich couldn’t resist digging at Romney’s track record at Bain? Voters remember details to which they can relate personally, like pensions and layoffs. It’s not a liability that’ll sink Perry, but yeah, it’ll be used against him. Texas Democrats are already using it, in fact.
