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One of the reasons that Americans are so fed up with their political leaders is their blatant hypocrisy. For instance, elected officials have been making the case, loudly and often, that America is broke and the best way to turn the economy around is by reducing retirement benefits and wages for public sector workers.But according to a recent article in USA Today - those impassioned calls for "belt-tightening," don't apply to lawmakers themselves - only the constituents that pay their salaries.
Take South Carolina State Senator David Thomas for instance.
At age 55, Thomas began collecting a pension while he was still in office.
Unlike most workers, who must retire from their jobs before getting retirement benefits, lawmakers can just change the rules, sometimes in the dead of night. Thomas used a one-sentence law that he and his colleagues passed in 2002 to let legislators receive a taxpayer-funded pension instead of a salary after serving for 30 years.
But pension perks aren't just for lawmakers in South Carolina. According to the USA Today article, more than 4,100 legislators in 33 states are positioned to benefit from special retirement laws that they enacted to boost their pensions by up to $100,000 a year.
The most egregious insult in all this is obviously the fact that many of the legislators who are writing state retirement laws for their own benefit are simultaneously gutting pay and benefits for the vast majority of American workers- especially law enforcement professionals.
Across the country, legislators have cut basic state services and slashed benefits for police, teachers and other workers while passing and preserving pension laws that grant politicians perks unavailable to voters.
For instance, this year, the state of Oregon will pay State Rep. Andy Olson $108,701. That's $15,100 more than the governor's salary.
Olson gets so much because Oregon legislators allow themselves to collect a public pension while in office. The "perk" has let Olson collect $705,000 from the state since he took office in January 2005. That includes more than a half a million dollars, some $560,000, in pension payments.
Olson, a retired state trooper, is just one in 10 of Oregon's 90 legislators who have collected $3.1 million in state pensions while in office.
"It's mind-blowing hypocrisy," state Rep. Stephen Webber, a Democrat from Missouri, told USA Today.
In Missouri, state lawmakers only work five months out of the year but still get paid slightly more on average than a state worker.
However, records show a typical lawmaker's pension averages 30 percent more than a state worker's. That's the upside of being able to write the laws for personal gain.
"The whole two-tiered system really encapsulates how we've operated here in Missouri and in the rest of the country," Webber told USA Today. "Lawmakers treat themselves differently."
The crooked system allows at least 570 lawmakers in 19 states to qualify for pensions that will pay them as much as their base legislative salaries, USA TODAY found.
In one case a state legislator actually receives 17 times more than his salary annually in pension benefits.
This is of course nothing short of outrageous. While elected officials go about the business of taking food off the table for public sector and private sector workers alike, they're actively lining their own pockets through the legislative process.
One of the tricks of the trade to keep the focus of the political class, made up largely of wealthy Americans, is to highlight what many private sector workers would consider overly generous pensions for public sector workers.
And to be sure, there are some cases where DROP programs and other mechanisms have afforded retired cops and firefighters pensions well in excess of $100,000 annually. Many tabloid style city newspapers run a list of the highest paid public employees annually - designed to foster the impression that $100,000 pensions are the norm.
But those are exceptional cases in states with strong unions and civil service protections. The reality is that the average pension for a retired public sector according to the non-partisan Employee Benefit Research Institute in 2009 was $13,007 for private-sector retirees and $25,286 for public retirees.
It's different for the political class.
Connecticut lawmakers can increase their pensions up to 50 percent by including mileage reimbursements that add as much as $15,500 a year to the salaries used to calculate their pensions.
According to the USA Today article, Rep. Lawrence Cafero Jr. racks up 75 miles each way driving from his home in Norwalk to the Capitol in Hartford. With each mile he drives, his pension improves.
Cafero, in public, says using mileage to increase a pension is "disturbing." He says he has proposed measures to end the practice but they have been defeated- a shock to no one paying any attention.
In Illinois, lawmakers who move on to higher paying state jobs after leaving office can apply the higher salary to their legislative pension.
In July, Democratic former House member Gary Hannig began collecting a $123,057 legislative pension, even though his legislative salary was $86,902 when he left office in 2009. His pensions based on his $150,228 salary as state Transportation director after leaving the Legislature.
In other states the mechanisms lawmakers use to pad their pensions are sometimes hard to believe.
Kansas calculates lawmakers' pensions as if they were paid 372 days a year.
Texas lawmakers haven't had a raise since 1975 and the only convene every other year. Because the work isn't "full time," they make a paltry $7,200 in the name of small government.
But behind the smoke and mirrors is a law they passed in 1981 that allows them to base their pensions on whatever the lawmakers decide to pay Texas trial judges. And guess what that means? Since 1981, Texas lawmakers have nearly tripled salaries for judges and tripled their own pension benefits. Just for good measure, Texas legislators also removed a sentence from the law that limited their pensions to 60% of a judge's salary. Now, the pensions can equal 100% of a judge's salary.
The changes mean that state Rep. Tom Craddick, a Republican who took office in 1969, is guaranteed a $125,000 pension - more than 17 times his $7,200 salary.
But unlike pensions for people that work full time and don't hold public office, when asked about their own pensions the same lawmakers gutting police salaries and public services like education say there's nothing they can do. Why would they want to change a system that affords them such extravagant benefits?
"That's just the way the system is," Craddick, who owns Craddick Properties, an investment business told USA Today.
And these same people that constantly justify attacks on the working class as "getting our fiscal house in order," have actually insulated themselves from their own so-called reforms.
Florida's Legislature protected itself this year when it began requiring state workers to pay 3 percent of their salary into the state pension fund. That's the first time state workers have had to make such contributions even though most states have long required worker contributions between 2% and 10 percent of salaries.
But Florida's legislators and other elected officials get a pension equal to 3% of salary multiplied by years of service. For state workers, the comparable figure is 1.6%.
"That is wrong - absolutely wrong," says state Sen. Mike Fasano, a Republican who this year proposed lowering elected officials' payout to 2%. "You lead by example."
Fasano's bill died in committee without a vote.
To read the full article with much more information on lawmakers padding their pensions, type "How state lawmakers pump up their pensions, USA Today," into your web browser.
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