You are correct!
One of my clients is a retired San Ramon FD engineer, that is being paid considerably more in retirement than he was at work.
And he has oodles of very expensive toys everywhere you look.
I have had many firefighter customers, I see their homes and their toys, and their remodels and add-ons, and their rental properties and beach homes, and over the decades I have come to see them as part of the well to do. They retire young and healthy, and collect a pension larger than most of us ever make in income, and the health benefits and such are wonderful, but why wouldn't they be, the unions write their own ticket and elect the politicians to sign off on them.
Forty years ago it was just a great job, with good pay, but today it is the lottery win, even while fires are disappearing from modern life.
THERE ARE ALMOST NO FIRES!
**Plenty of firefighters, but where are the fires? As ‘emergency’ changes its meaning, some critics are arguing it’s time to revisit a century-old system**
""But as a recent Globe story reported, city records show that major fires are becoming vanishingly rare. In 1975, there were 417 of them. Last year, there were 40. That’s a decline of more than 90 percent. A city that was once a tinderbox of wooden houses has become—thanks to better building codes, automatic sprinkler systems, and more careful behavior—a much less vulnerable place.
As this has happened, however, the number of professional firefighters in Boston has dropped only slightly, from around 1,600 in the 1980s to just over 1,400 today. The cost of running the department, meanwhile, has increased by almost $43 million over the past decade, and currently stands at $185 million, or around 7.5 percent of the city’s total budget.
The trend in Boston is part of a striking nationwide phenomenon. The number of career firefighters per capita in the United States is essentially unchanged since 1986, but of the roughly 30 million calls America’s fire departments responded to in 2011, the last year for which statistics are available, only about 1.4 million were fire-related—down by more than 50 percent since 1981, according to the National Fire Protection Association. And while the total number of calls being routed to fire departments is higher than it’s ever been, only 5 percent of them are fire related.""