EDITORIAL: State must end pension-boosting service credit option

It’s not enough for the Nevada Legislature to change retirement benefits for future public employees. The state’s pension plan provides perks and payouts so absurdly generous that some of them need to be dialed back right away.

Taxpayers are on the hook for billions of dollars worth of unfunded pension benefits, when they can barely afford to save for retirement themselves. It’s bad enough that they must subsidize benefits they’ll never have. But it’s outrageous that taxpayers subsidize the cost of providing government workers, who already retire far earlier than their private-sector peers, with even earlier retirements.

In Sunday’s Review-Journal, this page advocated sweeping pension reform. Those reforms focused primarily on moving future government hires out of the state’s existing defined-benefit pension plan and into a defined-contribution, 401(k)-style retirement plan. But Gov. Brian Sandoval and lawmakers can reduce the state’s pension liabilities for current government workers by making them actually work until they qualify for pension benefits.

The Review-Journal’s 12th of 25 policy recommendations to the 2015 Legislature in 25 days: Abolishing public employee service purchase credits, a practice also known as “buying air time,” effective July 1.

The Legislature needs to go this route.

Rhonda Cook one of the ace Atlanta Journal Constitution reporters bird-dogged corrupt teachers' looting the govt payroll story.

Cook reported: The 1980 Georgia General Assembly was concerned about “the increasing sophistication of various criminal elements,” so it adopted the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), patterned after a similar federal law.

RICO is often used to try to prove that a legal business was being used for illegal means, and, at its inception, was used to prosecute drug traffickers or organized crime members.

But in recent years prosecutors have applied RICO to government officials accused of using their offices for personal gain---the various former and current Atlanta public school officials looting the payroll.

To bring a case under Georgia’s RICO law, there must be at least two underlying felonies — such as fraud, bribery, witness tampering (among others).

RICO allows prosecutors to include multiple defendants charged with various crimes in the self-same indictment, and to charge that they were allegedly part of an ongoing criminal enterprise.

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