To the editor:

Richard Stumpf (Your Turn, Dec. 21) described the KPERS commission as a failure. So how will our state government fix this? One probable way is the Legislature won’t want to fix it, but will require us taxpayers to pony up with higher taxes and bail them out to further finance their retirement funds at the expense of ours. I am absolutely furious about this cronyism and lack of self-discipline exercised by legislators and other politicians.

For many years, I have had the opinion that legislators seem to be the root of much evil because they craft laws that enable people to do evil things legally. With this KPERS problem of early retirement, under-funding, shortened vesting, counting on continued unrealistic growth of the stock market without regard to market swings were all purposefully considered by legislators thus enabling legal golden parachutes for themselves and their cronies knowing very well that we taxpayers will be legally required to bail out this faulted unbalanced system. As individual legislators move on and are replaced by newly elected legislators, no one ever blames them for creating this example of legal evil lawmaking.  Thus, my other opinion, once electable, they seem to be already corrupt.

I realize that there are good legislators who have high moral standards and believe in crafting ethical laws. But, when the Legislature, as one single entity, creates legal evil without any regard to, or influence by its constituents and its highly ethical members, it corrupts itself as a whole.