OPINION: With sports gambling taxes, Kentucky state pensions are no longer the ‘sword of Damocles’

Tuesday, October 29, 2024 7:54 PM
Photo:  By Navin75 - Commonwealth Stadium, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41616769
  • Keith Kappes, Carter County Times

In Greek mythology, the “sword of Damocles” represents an impending disaster. It never goes away, constantly waiting to drop.

That analogy aptly described the pressure for many years on the Kentucky General Assembly to find a solution to the state’s public pension crisis. That problem reached the point that unfunded pension liabilities exceeded $30 billion and damaged the state’s credit rating.

But that worry apparently no longer exists, according to a glowing report on the first year of sports gambling taxes in Kentucky.

In what now appears to be akin to a stroke of genius, the Republican-dominated legislature followed the age-old tradition of sanitizing the state’s newest “sin tax” to guarantee the solvency of public pension systems.