Rep. Jeff Habay has been sentenced to serve 6 to 12 months in prison for having his staff do campaign work on state time, and the Shaler Republican is accused of more serious crimes that may cost him his pension.

All that is very interesting, but the state retirement system itself may be the larger scandal.

If you work in private industry, your pension is likely on shaky ground. In the past year, Alcoa, IBM and Verizon have been among the corporations that have announced the end of pensions as we have known them.

Alcoa will no longer offer a pension to new hires, and IBM and Verizon have gone further, announcing that current employees will have their pensions frozen at specified dates in the next year or two. They'll keep whatever pension benefits they will have earned by the freeze date, and then the size of their monthly retirement check won't increase, no matter how long they work.

Yes, the defined-benefit pension is circling the drain, and the 401(k) plan that is dependent on employee contributions is taking its place. That is if you're in the private sector.

We, the taxpayers of Pennsylvania, are still on the hook for a pension that is extraordinarily generous to the state's 253 lawmakers.

Our lawmakers are vested in the pension plan after five years, which is fine. But a retired legislator can begin receiving full benefits at age 50, which is nuts. Most other state employees must wait until they're 60.

Lawmaking is not a physical job, like firefighting or whaling, that makes legislators incapable of doing the work past age 50. Nor was legislating ever meant to be a guaranteed job. There is no conceivable benefit to the commonwealth to give legislators incentives to retire early. Retiring them early is the voters' job.

As you may have heard, too, a legislator with 10 years in office can receive health insurance, even after leaving office, until age 65 when he must enroll in Medicare. Spouses and children (until age 21) are covered, too. (Mr. Habay, 39, would lose those benefits if he is convicted of filing false reports to law enforcement authorities. That trial begins Friday.)

Retirees constitute a ticking fiscal time bomb for taxpayers. The number of state employees isn't growing, which is good, but there are almost as many retirees as there are state workers. In a few years, there will be more.

The state pension system recently won praise from Business Week for its return on investments, but that record is loaded with risk. A big balloon payment is due in 2012, when the state contribution to the plan is supposed to jump. That will come from taxpayers.

Pennsylvania lawmakers added to this burden in 2001 when they raised pensions for most state employees and public school employees by 25 percent and their own pensions by 50 percent. Back then, the stock market was flush, but now corporate America is scaling back benefits.

Anyone seeking election to the General Assembly this year should advocate an end to the defined-benefit pension plan for lawmakers. In 1990, Californians voted to do this at the same time they imposed term limits, and they voted again in 2000 to deny their lawmakers the option of participating in the state pension plan.

Californians believe turnover in the statehouse is good. We haven't had much of that in Harrisburg; the re-election rate for House members has hovered around 98 percent for more than a decade.

Unlike Californians, Pennsylvania voters lack the right to initiate statewide referenda, so the only realistic route toward lasting reform is to elect new lawmakers who see the office as a cause more than a career.

Another way to cut these legacy costs would be to shrink the size of Pennsylvania's 253-member Legislature, but I've made that argument almost as many times in this space as Seattle Seahawks fans have complained about the Super Bowl referees.

Well, OK, not that many times, but the point is a Legislature reckless with its costs is in no position to ask anyone else to sacrifice anything. Removing one legislator or one pension should be only the coincidental beginning of more sweeping reform.