Double-dipping, in which public employees can “retire” to collect their full pension, then immediately be rehired to their old job and continue collecting a salary on top of their pension, rightly draws the ire of taxpayers, most of whom have no prospect of ever getting such a cushy deal. …

In 2010, a consortium of Ohio’s newspapers found that a quarter of the superintendents in the state’s 614 school districts were double-dipping. In all, the newspapers found that 32,000 public employees were collecting $1 billion in pension payouts on top of their government paychecks.

This is a system that is deeply flawed and should be reformed.

The practice is bad public policy for several reasons. First, the pension plan is unnecessarily stressed, because it is paying retirement benefits to someone who doesn’t need or want to be retired. Those additional years of payments add strain to pension systems that already are on thin ice financially, because of stock-market losses in 2008 and the skyrocketing cost of health care, which is included in most of Ohio’s public pensions, even though the law doesn’t require it. …

Efforts are under way to reform Ohio’s public-pension plans, and they likely will raise retirement ages slightly. But no plan proposed so far requires public employees to wait until the typical Social Security retirement age to draw their pension benefits.

This is a system ripe for an overhaul.

The Columbus Dispatch