COLA cuts punish the wrong people

The headline in the Daily Herald announced that our state legislature was “moving toward reform” by voting for HB 1165. This legislation temporarily freezes the cost-of-living increases currently included in state pensions. It also contains provisions for eventually resuming those increases with a limit of $750 per year.

I do not understand how you see this as movement or as reform. This legislation attempts to make those of us who paid our obligations and did our jobs to now pay for the past sins of state legislators and governors. However, it will have no beneficial effect. Since it so obviously violates the contract between employees and the state, it will be declared unconstitutional by the courts. We will then still have the current pension crisis — except in the intervening time it will have become much worse.

Furthermore, it is not true “reform” since it does nothing to correct the underlying error of the state’s failure to make the required annual contributions for the past 35 years. This legislation allows the elected officials, whose behaviors and lies should be considered crimes, to continue to serve in public office and to collect pensions in spite of their years of malfeasance.

I suggest a more accurate headline would have been, “House ignores reality, attempts to punish the victims of legislative malfeasance”

Jeff Huebner

Schaumburg