IN THE PAST few weeks, former Rep. Becky Richardson told lawmakers she's so disgusted with the mess at the Employment Security Commission that she won't run for re-election to its governing commission, former Rep. Steve Lanford leapt back in the spotlight, boulder still firmly implanted on shoulder, trying to hide public information from the public, and a report raised red flags about South Carolina's state employee pension system.
All of which made me realize it's time once again to write about the most obscene political perk in the state: the Legislature's private hush-hush slush fund of a pension system.
It turns out that Ms. Richardson's announcement shouldn't have set me thinking about this topic, because what I had always thought was the most egregious aspect of the system doesn't actually exist. But it's all relative. Like other former lawmakers, her legislative pension will be nearly three times as generous as the one we provide to regular state employees.
Regular state employees who work for 30 years draw a pension worth 55 percent of their highest average salary. Former legislators draw 155 percent. That's not a typo; legislative pensions are worth half again their full salary.
Did I mention that being a legislator is a part-time job?
Legislators do contribute 10 percent of their annual pay to their special retirement system, while regular state employees pay just 6.5 percent, but that doesn't come close to covering the super sweet pension. That comes from the taxpayers' super-sweet subsidy: It varies from year to year, but last year, the "employer" (read: taxpayers) contributed $1.46 for every dollar contributed by regular state employees. We contributed $3.16 for every $1 legislators contributed. That's actually down from $5.20 a decade earlier, not because the pension is less generous, but because the Legislature just appropriates whatever amount is needed to its own pension system every year, and it has allowed the reserves to dwindle slightly as the budget problems have mounted. The number you use to multiply by the salary and years of service credit to calculate your pension remains at 4.82 percent for legislators, and 1.82 percent for everybody else.
(I had thought that former legislators who got their colleagues to give them cushy state jobs like Ms. Richardson's $106,000-a-year, no-qualifications-required gig over at the Employment Security Commission got to apply the generous legislative multiplier to their higher state employee salary; it turns out they draw two separate pensions, one based on the legislative multiplier, the other based on the high salary but lower, regular employee multiplier.)
Mr. Lanford's cameo performance defending secret government and attacking the media for trying to "sell papers" by reporting on the performance of emergency medical personnel made me think of the legislative pension system because he put forward the most audacious argument I've ever heard for sweetening it up even more. Back in 2000, when he was about to leave the House, he proposed allowing former legislators to draw early retirement after just 28 years, instead of 30, because lawmakers had just lowered the early retirement age for state employees to 28 years.
His proposal wasn't nearly as audacious as some I've seen, but his explanation was: It was unfair, he said, to give state employees that early retirement benefit when legislators didn't have it.
Did I mention that former legislators can keep buying credit in their retirement system, at the same super-subsidized rates as current legislators? That option is available to everyone who served at least eight years in the Legislature, whether they left voluntarily, as Mr. Lanford did, or the voters kicked them out. Regular state employees, on the other hand, don't even have the option to buy additional years' credit until they've worked at least 25 years, and then they have to pay between 42 percent and 58 percent of their salary, rather than the 10 percent former legislators pay.
Former legislators would be crazy not to buy extra credit: It currently costs just under $2,300 per year. But since the pension for people with 30 years' service credit is $32,739, they make up their entire 30-year investment in just barely more than two years.
All the trouble that a new Pew Center on the States report said our main state pension system is in also made me think of the legislative system, because it never has been in any trouble, and it never will be. The main state employee pension system has an unfunded liability of 29 years, which is just one year short of the 30-year maximum liability period that a pension system is supposed to have; it's 30 years for the police pension system. For the legislative system, it's 17 years - which means the legislative system is nearly twice as sound as the ones legislators maintain for most state employees.
You might think that with the state budget bleeding red ink and legislators having to furlough themselves to make ends meet, they would at least consider scaling back this sweetheart pension system, which cost taxpayers $2.5 million last year. To the contrary, the silence has been deafening.
Rep. Herb Kirsh and Sen. Greg Ryberg and a rotating (small) cast of other legislators have held back all the attempts over the past decade to sneak through even more sweeteners, but no one has mounted a serious effort to eliminate the system, or even scale back its most over-the-top elements.
That's because the few legislators who really want to change it know that all they'll accomplish is to make all of their colleagues really, really mad. And their colleagues know that most voters have no clue about it. Besides, what's $2.5 million a year?
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