JMI Sr. Fellow Dr. Randall Holcombe quoted in Ocala Star-Banner article “Commissioners should opt out of retirement, some say” regarding government pension reform and elected officials’ pension benefits.Excerpt:
. . . “Elected officials should be eligible for the same type of pension coverage as other workers in the governments they oversee,” Randall Holcombe, an economics professor at Florida State University and a senior fellow at the James Madison Institute, a conservative Tallahassee-based think tank, said in an email.Holcombe suggested that relative to the debate over the retirement plans of the rank-and-file, elected officials’ retirement packages have not gotten sufficient attention and probably deserve more scrutiny than they have received because of the possibility of “excessive” benefits.In a bigger picture, however, the FRS changes were necessary.Although the system is in good financial shape now, Holcombe, who supports privatizing the FRS, maintained that politicians have made easy promises in the past that taxpayers will be hard pressed to fund in the future. . . .
