In North Carolina, any state employee who puts in just five years of service is eligible to receive free retiree health insurance for life. Unbelievably sweet deal, but at a time when state budgets are being squeezed how can North Carolina afford it and why do its politicians allow this?

Simple, the pols are state employees as well and benefit from this governmental largesse just as much as any other state employee. In fact, since job security doesn’t really extend to politicians (well, the non-corrupt ones at least), they benefit more than other public sector workers because of the short window of their terms. The next time you hear a politician whining that we need to raise taxes, cut services, issue bonds, etc., ask them what the present value of their retirement package is costing us. You probably won’t like the answer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 5th, 2005 at 7:00 am by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable, Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.