Just about ready to get the pension crisis?

The Louisville Courier Journal continues to miss the point of the anger caused by the big raise for the state legislature's Executive Director Bobby Sherman.

"The reason the issue came up is that the General Assembly closed the retirement window, which meant that the 56-year-old Mr. Sherman would either have to leave or lose $1,348 per month in retirement benefits, forever."
"If he had given up his post, the state would have had to pay not only some 109,000 per year in retirement for him but a salary of at least $132,840 for his successor. That's $241,840. Instead, Mr. Sherman stayed at a new salary of $195,000..."

It takes a special kind of blindness to miss that the fat, taxpayer-guaranteed pension is a big part of the problem. A state that can't afford to pay the salaries it pays or to properly fund the retirement system that pays people who are no longer working, has no business jacking up salaries even more.

And the idea that a replacement for Mr. Sherman would cost at least as much as he does is the clearest indicator that we haven't gotten serious about our fiscal situation.

But the Courier Journal being the Courier Journal, they weren't satisfied to be just a little histrionic and misleading. They had to throw in this:

"Most of the outcry has come from politicians with self-serving reasons to sound upset. If only they were as indignant about the revenue crisis and the cuts it has necessitated."

If you are keeping score at home, that's the revenue crisis that isn't a revenue crisis and the necessitated cuts that still left us overspending by $1.5 billion.

And all this makes it even less likely we will be able to seriously address our $27 billion public employee benefits underfunding.