Don't Waste Chance to Cut Legislative Perk



  Thursday’s editorial (provided by The State’s Cindi Scoppe) takes on the bubbling issue of overly generous legislative pensions. Locally, legislators receiving such pensions include Dick Elliott of North Myrtle Beach, Yancey McGill of Kingstree, Liston Barfield of Aynor and George Hearn of Conway:

By sheer coincidence, the top item on my to-do list on Friday was to write one of my periodic columns about the legislature’s pension perk, which taxpayers subsidize at three times the rate we subsidize pensions for teachers, social workers, janitors and other people who work 40 hours a week for our state, and which pays benefits of 150 percent of our part-time legislators’ salaries.

But as I reached down to pick up the stack of newspapers on the way into my office, the front page of USA Today grabbed my attention: Big green party balloons dominated the page, along with a headline that screamed “How state lawmakers PUMP UP PENSIONS in ways you can’t” and a smiling picture of my friend Sen. David Thomas – now the national poster child for excessive legislative perks.

By day’s end, legislative hypocrisy was the talk of the town, Gov. Nikki Haley was promising to go after lawmakers’ most obscene perk, and suddenly something that had never even been conceivable before seemed entirely possible: that the days could be numbered for the General Assembly Retirement System.

Up until now, the most that had seemed possible was to block efforts to sweeten it up even more. That hasn’t been easy, because lawmakers always try to conceal their actions from the public and even from their fellow legislators, hiding the changes inside tediously technical bills concerning the regular state employees’ pension system. Yet for more than a decade, all but one of these efforts have been uncovered and defeated.

But scale back the benefits, or eliminate the legislative pensions altogether? That simply wasn’t on the table.

Lawmakers who regularly oppose efforts to increase the taxpayer subsidy would get very quiet when I asked if they would try to reduce it or phase it out. There’s just no point, they’d say. It won’t pass, we’ll just make everybody mad, and then we won’t be able to accomplish anything on other issues – which is the reason most good legislators give for all sorts of courageous stands they don’t take. Even the governor who made sport of attacking the legislature, Mark Sanford, never took it on.

So it’s exciting that Gov. Haley has decided to take up the fight, and that a handful of legislators contacted by reporters last week said that they want to scale back their pensions.

Gov. Haley isn’t entirely new to the fight. Then-Ways and Means Chairman Dan Cooper’s 2008 effort to enhance the legislative pensions was the catalyst for the transparency campaign that she rode to the governor’s mansion.

It was a great example of the value of recorded votes: The House initially approved a bill to reform the regular state employees’ pension systems on an unrecorded voice vote, after Mr. Cooper explained it to his colleagues without mentioning that it added an automatic cost-of-living adjustment for legislators. Over the next few days, five more votes were taken: The legislative COLA was approved in both of the voice votes, and defeated in all three recorded votes. Ms. Haley told me later that she was convinced that knowing their votes would be recorded would have stopped it from getting even one positive vote, because that would have forced legislators to read the bill, or at least make certain they knew what was in it.

But even as she took on House leaders over recorded votes, Ms. Haley did nothing to try to scale back the perk. That’s not a slam on her; no one has made a serious, sustained attempt to scale it back. Rep. James Smith offered a budget amendment once to close the legislative pension system to newly elected legislators; it was defeated on a voice vote. This year a handful of tea party legislators filed bills to shut down the regular state employee pension system that would have been DOA even if they hadn’t also proposed to end legislative pensions.

Now that USA Today has put the issue on the front page, even Sen. Thomas, who ribs me about my “fixation” on legislative pensions nearly every time I see him, told The Greenville News on Saturday that, why, certainly, the legislature should consider “everything” to identify “excesses” as it looks to shore up the pension systems. Of course, the legislative pension system isn’t in financial trouble, because the legislature puts enough tax money in it every year to keep it financially sound. Besides, what else was he going to say, after he got caught telling the whole nation that the reason he had taken the option of pretending to “retire” for pension purposes – which means he gets a $32,390 pension instead of his $10,400 salary – was that by doing so, “You get paid more”?

The problem is that there’s a big difference between calling for reform in September, while the legislature is out of session, and voting for it in January. The reason the legislature has been able to maintain this system for the dozen years that I’ve been writing about it is that voters haven’t demanded they abolish it.

It’s time to change that. There is no legitimate reason for part-time legislators even to receive pensions, much less pensions that are larger than the ones drawn by the public employees who dedicated their careers to teaching our children and keeping our communities safe and doing the mundane work that we all take for granted, but that is essential to making our state a decent place to live.

This moment of outrage provides us an opportunity we have not had before to eliminate this obscenity. Let’s not blow it.

 

But as I reached down to pick up the stack of newspapers on the way into my office, the front page of USA Today grabbed my attention: Big green party balloons dominated the page, along with a headline that screamed “How state lawmakers PUMP UP PENSIONS in ways you can’t” and a smiling picture of my friend Sen. David Thomas – now the national poster child for excessive legislative perks.

By day’s end, legislative hypocrisy was the talk of the town, Gov. Nikki Haley was promising to go after lawmakers’ most obscene perk, and suddenly something that had never even been conceivable before seemed entirely possible: that the days could be numbered for the General Assembly Retirement System.

Up until now, the most that had seemed possible was to block efforts to sweeten it up even more. That hasn’t been easy, because lawmakers always try to conceal their actions from the public and even from their fellow legislators, hiding the changes inside tediously technical bills concerning the regular state employees’ pension system. Yet for more than a decade, all but one of these efforts have been uncovered and defeated.

But scale back the benefits, or eliminate the legislative pensions altogether? That simply wasn’t on the table.

Lawmakers who regularly oppose efforts to increase the taxpayer subsidy would get very quiet when I asked if they would try to reduce it or phase it out. There’s just no point, they’d say. It won’t pass, we’ll just make everybody mad, and then we won’t be able to accomplish anything on other issues – which is the reason most good legislators give for all sorts of courageous stands they don’t take. Even the governor who made sport of attacking the legislature, Mark Sanford, never took it on.

So it’s exciting that Gov. Haley has decided to take up the fight, and that a handful of legislators contacted by reporters last week said that they want to scale back their pensions.

Gov. Haley isn’t entirely new to the fight. Then-Ways and Means Chairman Dan Cooper’s 2008 effort to enhance the legislative pensions was the catalyst for the transparency campaign that she rode to the governor’s mansion.

It was a great example of the value of recorded votes: The House initially approved a bill to reform the regular state employees’ pension systems on an unrecorded voice vote, after Mr. Cooper explained it to his colleagues without mentioning that it added an automatic cost-of-living adjustment for legislators. Over the next few days, five more votes were taken: The legislative COLA was approved in both of the voice votes, and defeated in all three recorded votes. Ms. Haley told me later that she was convinced that knowing their votes would be recorded would have stopped it from getting even one positive vote, because that would have forced legislators to read the bill, or at least make certain they knew what was in it.

But even as she took on House leaders over recorded votes, Ms. Haley did nothing to try to scale back the perk. That’s not a slam on her; no one has made a serious, sustained attempt to scale it back. Rep. James Smith offered a budget amendment once to close the legislative pension system to newly elected legislators; it was defeated on a voice vote. This year a handful of tea party legislators filed bills to shut down the regular state employee pension system that would have been DOA even if they hadn’t also proposed to end legislative pensions.

Now that USA Today has put the issue on the front page, even Sen. Thomas, who ribs me about my “fixation” on legislative pensions nearly every time I see him, told The Greenville News on Saturday that, why, certainly, the legislature should consider “everything” to identify “excesses” as it looks to shore up the pension systems. Of course, the legislative pension system isn’t in financial trouble, because the legislature puts enough tax money in it every year to keep it financially sound. Besides, what else was he going to say, after he got caught telling the whole nation that the reason he had taken the option of pretending to “retire” for pension purposes – which means he gets a $32,390 pension instead of his $10,400 salary – was that by doing so, “You get paid more”?

The problem is that there’s a big difference between calling for reform in September, while the legislature is out of session, and voting for it in January. The reason the legislature has been able to maintain this system for the dozen years that I’ve been writing about it is that voters haven’t demanded they abolish it.

It’s time to change that. There is no legitimate reason for part-time legislators even to receive pensions, much less pensions that are larger than the ones drawn by the public employees who dedicated their careers to teaching our children and keeping our communities safe and doing the mundane work that we all take for granted, but that is essential to making our state a decent place to live.

This moment of outrage provides us an opportunity we have not had before to eliminate this obscenity. Let’s not blow it.