Government Pension Reform Would Have Saved Taxpayers Billions Had It Been Enacted and Wisconsin’s Collective Bargaining Reform Shockingly Proves to Have Been a Dud

One simple idea would have saved billions, not millions, and fundamentally changed the relationship between government workers and taxpayers going forward.

Listen to my latest interview with Bruce Hooley on The Bruce Hooley Show on 98.9FM The Answer where we talked about ACTBlue’s corruption, the unexplained drones on the East Coast, and the FBI’s Confidential Human Sources at the January 6 riot.

Also, here is an hour-long interview I did on the The Chairman’s Hour with Summit County Republican Chairman Bryan Williams on 1420AM The Answer where we discussed the future work of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and what a DOGE agenda would look like for Ohio.

Moving on to bigger issues, I want to bring you back to 2010 when I ran The Buckeye Institute and Mary McCleary produced an excellent piece on Ohio’s public pension system. Mary wrote a powerful policy brief on “The Impact of Shifting Ohio State Workers from Defined Benefit Plans to Defined Contribution Plans” in which she detailed the cost savings to taxpayers to put state government workers in the same type of system most Ohioans live under. Mary wrote:

This pension reform idea came after we released the groundbreaking report that detailed how state government workers were no longer underpaid compared to their private sector peers; rather, we found that they had far surpassed their private sector peers on compensation. When health care and the government pension were thrown in, working for state government proved to be a multi-million dollar employment opportunity for every state worker no matter what they did. You can read the extensively researched report, "The Grand Bargain Is Dead: The Compensation of State Government Workers Far Exceeds Their Private Sector Neighbors," for details. Mary’s pension idea adopted what had already been done in Michigan in the 1990s under reform-minded Republican Governor John Engler.

I bring this idea up now because had the Republican General Assembly and Governor John Kasich adopted Mary’s idea, Ohio already would be halfway through the conversion of state government workers from a defined benefit system to a defined contribution system. Keep in mind, the beauty of Mary’s idea is that we held existing state government workers whole by keeping them on the defined benefit system. The simple brilliance of the idea was NEW state government workers would start under the defined contribution system and through attrition (i.e., as existing state government workers aged and retired they would be replaced by workers not eligible for the same gold-plated public pension program). By 2039, state government workers would all be on defined contribution plans, thereby saving taxpayers billions ($3.3 billion to $6.0 billion) and ensuring they weren’t on the hook for pension shortfalls, which always exist in government pension programs. For example, the state government worker pension wants to raise the taxpayer contribution from 14% per year to 18% per year and lawmakers are currently considering another increase of the taxpayer contribtion to the police and fire pension fund due to its insolvency.