New Jersey Public Pension Scam: Part Time Workers Get Big Benefits

The Star-Ledger reports on Gov. Corzine and public pension madness:

Corzine's plan does nothing to fix the problem that he's outlined at great length in the 13 town meetings so far, the unfunded liability of more than $100 billion for current and future retirees.

"We should also revisit some of the unfinished business from last year's special session on property tax reform, such as eliminating defined benefit pensions for part-time workers," he said.

We should indeed. What the governor is alluding to is a system in which a political hack can get a public job that requires little more than cashing an annual paycheck of $5,000 or so. After 25 years perhaps, said hack gets appointed to a $100,000-a-year job. If he can keep that job for three years, he can retire with an annual pension of $50,000 plus health benefits for life.

In other words, even though Corzine and his fellow Democrats labored for six months in 2006 on tax reform, they couldn't bring themselves to make even this glaringly obvious change. Why? Perhaps because lots of legislators take advantage of this loophole to get big public pensions.

In any event, it's not just the part-time employees who need to be eliminated from the state pension system. It's the full-time employees. I attended four of the 13 town meetings so far, and the one point on which Corzine convinced me is that the pension plan is effectively bankrupt. If his numbers are correct, the defined-contribution plan needs to be phased out, not just for part-time employees but for full-time employees. New public employees, both state and local, should be enrolled in defined-benefit plans just like most taxpayers are these days.

Most audience members seemed to share that view. But that's not the message Corzine wanted to convey. He clearly expected the public to sympathize with the public employees.

That didn't happen. Those town meetings are doing a lot more for the governor than for the public. And when they resume, as his staff says they will, he stands to learn even more lessons. Perhaps he'll even learn that he should have stayed in the Senate.

The greed of public sector unions.