The Pressing Need for State Pension Reform
Earlier, we wrote of one of the many bad ideas in the legislature this session:
In what appears to be a needless but costly rearrangement of deck chairs, the Senate Committee on Education will hear HB 164, transferring all KCTCS employees who are engaged in providing educational services and support to inmates to the Department of Corrections. Here they will join the state retirement system and the state health plan. Not only will it cost more to hire people into the Department of Corrections than KCTCS, just because of the association, but the benefits will be more expensive too. What a great plan.
This bad idea is almost law. One of the reason this is such a bad plan is because the state is unable to afford the employees it already has. It does not need a whole new agency of employees (many KCTCS employees are under contract and not participants in state benefit plans).
In further evidence of what bad fiscal shape the state is in, the New York Times offers this graph of state debt and pension obligations as a proportion of state GDP.
h/t to Page One Kentucky
