Retirement anxiety brings battleground blues for Biden in states like Pennsylvania

For 30 years, Jacqualyn James taught American history and psychology to high school students in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, in the eastern part of the Keystone State.

A graduate of Bucknell University, she became a teacher to support her family after she and her husband divorced. “I considered it a very important thing for young people to learn about the history of this country,” she told NBC News, estimating that she’d taught 7,000 students by the time she retired in 1998.

During her teaching years, James paid regularly into her pension, the Public School Employees’ Retirement System of Pennsylvania. “I expected it to last my lifetime,” the 88-year-old said.

While her $25,000 yearly pension has indeed lasted, because of a fluke in Pennsylvania law, it is now worth half of what it was when she retired. That’s because James and roughly 70,000 other retired public employees in the state have not received a cost-of-living adjustment on their monthly payments for more than 20 years. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, every dollar in pension payments James was promised when she retired is worth 51 cents today.

James and her unlucky former colleagues retired before the enactment of a 2001 state law known as Act 9 that increased pension benefits for public workers. Some of those 70,000 people, whose average age exceeds 80, are experiencing significant financial hardships. Many have no access to Social Security, as is the case with roughly 40% of all public school teachers across the nation, according to the National Association of State Retirement Administrators.

Overall, the U.S. economy is humming, the data shows, a situation that typically favors a sitting president in an election year. But financial anxiety