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Don’t let the naysayers fool you, the bill passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature this week — it may have been signed into law by the time you read this — is pension reform. It dramatically revamps the benefits for most state and all public school employees in the near future, and that is long overdue.

But don’t let the politicians fool you. This is not a solution to an acute financial crisis that they created and then ignored for a decade, letting it grow like like Japanese knotweed planted on a grassy river bank. This bill does nothing to alleviate the enormous shortfall in the state’s pension funds — one for state employees, a much larger one for teachers.

So, it’s more than what Harrisburg often does — you know, pass some bill with great fanfare that actually does next to nothing. But it is less than what needs to be done.

The bill should reduce future pension liabilities by offering teachers and public servants three choices involving defined benefits (as they have now) and defined contributions (payroll set-asides into retirement savings accounts).

That’s realistic. No one paid with tax dollars deserves a pension that guarantees up to 100 percent of their salary after they stop working — at least, no one deserves it unless all of us get it. And please don’t say you “work hard” for it, many people work just as hard for far less.

For most of us, retirement is, at best, a three-legged stool: A defined benefits pension plan, social security and whatever you manage to save on your own or through payroll deductions.

Such a system keeps all your proverbial retirement eggs out of one basket. If something happens to one of the three legs, you still have two streams of retirement income.

The three-legged system also reduces the perception that those with lower incomes — and often, these days, with no defined benefits pension — are paying for the lavish retirement of public employees.

Bluntly, it can be infuriating for taxpayers on modest salaries to pay taxes that help public educators and politicians retire with 75 percent to 100 percent of their wages — especially if those wages are higher than anything the taxpayer earns.

It may be easier to write that check knowing said public employee has to save money to get anything above a guaranteed 50 percent of pay upon retirement.

So, yeah, the change is for the better. It is, alas, not for the best.

Still unaddressed: money needed for existing state public pension obligations, estimated — depending on who you ask and when — to run as high as $76 million in red ink. The new bill does nothing to resolve that problem, which is making school district contributions to the pension fund skyrocket.

Until that shortfall is adequately fixed, the impact of Harrisburg’s inane vote in 2001 to increase pension benefits will remain, choking school district budgets for years if not decades.

It’s as if Harrisburg has been kicking a soda can and an oil barrel down the road, and finally decided to get rid of the soda can.

— Times Leader

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