funds

By following through on entitlement reforms started in the 1990s, Congress can defuse a ticking entitlement-spending time bomb and allow states to lead the way on holding costs down and better serving taxpayers.

In rural North Carolina, Lyndon McLellan runs the L&M Convenience Mart, a small gas station and restaurant, half a mile outside the limits of Fairmont. In the summer of 2014, every last penny of McLellan’s business bank account was drained by Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents, on the pretext McLellan was attempting to conceal evidence of money laundering.

Unless local and state governments act now, a tsunami of underfunded public pension plan obligations will soon rush ashore and drown taxpayers with tax hikes and crippling debt.

In 2011, numerous local-government special-interest groups and elected officials fought against Gov. John Kasich’s proposed reduction to the Local Government Fund, a pool of taxpayers’ money collected by the state government and redistributed to local governments’ general revenue funds.