They deserve raise if perks are pared

Pat Bauer has a point.

The new speaker of the Indiana House moaned last week about state lawmakers' low pay. The base salary is a paltry $11,600 a year, a figure that hasn't increased in a year, a figure that hasn't increased in more than two decades.

Bauer contends that the meager salary makes it harder to find strong candidates to run for legislative seats.

That may be true in some cases, especially given the amount of time the job soaks up. Larger obstacles to persuading potential candidates to enter legislative races, however, would seem to be the nastiness of some campaigns and the electoral advantages provided to incumbents through gerrymandered districts.

Overall compensation also isn't nearly as bad as the base pay indicates. Leadership stipends and compensation for expenses - $137 a day during sessions and $54.80 each day that legislators aren't in session - boosted average pay to just under $45,000 last year.

And until recently, the perks, including lifetime health insurance and extraordinary7 pension benefits, were well beyond what most private sector employees could expect. The House has dropped the heavily subsidized health-care perk, and the Senate is in the process of eliminating it. The generous retirement benefit remains. Yet, Bauer is right in noting that base pay, unchanged since 1985, is unreasonably low. It would be better for taxpayers if lawmakers were to accept a tradeoff: increase the base salary in exchange for reducing the 401(k) benefit.

As it stands, taxpayers pump $4 into the retirement plan for every $1 a lawmaker invests. If legislators were to adjust that amount to a more realistic ratio - say, $1 to $1 - then a re-evaluation of base pay not only would be justified but also politically palatable.

The low salary has prompted legislators over the years to reward themselves with extraordinary perks. That's not, in the end, a bargain for taxpayers.

The more honest approach would be to steadily increase legislators' pay over time to better reflect the importance of their work. A front-door pay hike is a better alternative than the backdoor benefits that lawmakers have lavished on themselves.

The Indianapolis Star