I’ve written many times about politicians and bureaucrats screwing taxpayers with lavish compensation packages, but this story from Philadelphia is jaw dropping.
Councilwoman Marian B. Tasco is retiring Friday, but only so she can collect a $478,057 pension check and return to work Monday, when she will be sworn in for her seventh term. Tasco was one of six Council members to enroll in the city’s controversial Deferred Retirement Option Plan, better known as DROP. She did not immediately return a request for comment. …When DROP was introduced during the Rendell administration, it was thought that it would cost little or nothing. But a study by the administration of Mayor Nutter said DROP had cost the city $258 million over 10 years.
Remember stories like this every time ones of these reprehensible politicians claim that spending has been cut to the bone and taxes have to be raised.
So long as it is accepted legal practice that any private or public working person’s retirement is to be funded by taxpayers, natural human greed will find a way to reward the resulting corruption.
Instead of being outraged that a politician took advantage of her system to put almost half a million dollars into her pocket in a sham retirement, shouldn’t we be working to: 1). close the loophole which permits the sham retirement; and 2). more importantly, establish personal retirement accounts that disproportionately REWARD personal ownership and responsibility in retirement funding, eventually ending public funding of retirement because it is so uncompetitively penurious?
So long as public funding of retirement is financially superior to private alternatives, the resulting corruption, because of human nature, is entirely predictable. Build a retirement policy that gets human nature BOTH on the side of the taxpayer and the retiree, and corruption will naturally collapse.
But, with Democrats and Republicans making retirement policy for the past 78 years, let’s not hold our breath waiting for them to discern the fundamental problem.
agree with Don Kirk
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