To those non-rails who clearly don't know what they are talking about and think this is some kind of "welfare"-

Given what I've made in my career, I've contributed signinficantly more than average, and I paid for my pension, and probably a few others. This isn't welfare-we paid for this pension-every pay period, the fund was sound, and they decided to steal part of the credits we had already earned.

Despite current economic conditions, lack of skilled rail workers is becoming a real problem and will get worse in the future, as our population ages and our economy recovers. This is also true of many other skilled fields. So penalizing skilled, educated, experienced retiree's for working more years, penalizing efficient and experienced workers for contributing more money to make our pension systems even stronger, and using our pension contributions to prop up crooked overspending politicians in Congress is probably not good long term policy.