Pennsylvania legislative pensions are scandalous

Here's the deal: You work for 22 years. When you retire, your employer gives you a lump-sum payment of 126,614, which represents every penny withheld from your paycheck for your pension during those years, plus 4 percent interest. And the employer agrees to pay you 50,340 a year for the rest of your life, which given that you are 49 years old, will probably be about 30 years.
If that sounds like too sweet a deal to be true, well, it is -- almost everywhere. The exception is the Pennsylvania Legislature.
Those are the actual figures for the pension being collected by Mike Veon, a Democrat from Beaver Falls, Pa., who served 22 years in one of the most profligate state Legislatures in the nation.
And Veon did only a little better than half as well as former Sen. Robert Jubelirer, an Altoona Republican who had been in the Senate for 32 years. He was defeated in the May 2006 primary, but is consoling himself with a lump-sum payment of 191,804 and a pension of 90,934 a year.
And remember, these are pensions for people who often had other jobs on the side or go on to new jobs after leaving the Legislature. Veon, for instance, won't rest on his 4,195 a month from the taxpayers; he's opening a lobbying business in Harrisburg. He'll be paid by the smokeless tobacco industry to urge his former colleagues to refrain from extending the state's sales tax to snuff and cigars.
Foxes in the henhouse
The only way that these outrageously generous pensions exist is that the terms are being written by the people who collect them -- the legislators -- not the people who pay them -- the taxpayers.
It's time for that to change.
Two years ago, legislators gave themselves a pay raise from about 70,000 a year to 81,000. A public outcry led to the raises being rescinded.
Gov. Ed Rendell is proposing reforms that he says will make the Legislature less costly and more efficient. We'll have to see if that's enough.
The legislators would be wise to respond with some real belt-tightening. Otherwise angry taxpayers could pursue a referendum to rewrite that part of the state Constitution defining compensation for legislators. Mounting a referendum is not an easy task, but if one ever gets rolling, it's safe to say that 70,000 salaries (leaders and chairmen get bonus pay), Cadillac car leases, Cadillac-like health benefits, 130 per diem expense reimbursements and outrageous pensions will be perks of the past.