Opinion

The disability scam

Retired FDNY Lt. John McLaughlin probably should be paying taxpayers for his remarkable fitness as a top long-distance runner, given his years of strenuous work as a firefighter.

Instead, as The Post’s Carl Campanile reported yesterday, the 55-year-old “Iron Man” triathlete is collecting an $86,000 disability pension from taxpayers.

No wonder New Yorkers are increasingly fed up with public employees, as a fascinating poll last week found.

Since retiring in 2001, McLaughlin has run numerous marathons and other races, often finishing near the top — and first or second in his age group.

He’s “an incredibly fast runner,” a fellow athlete says. “He runs like the wind.”

Well, fast enough to get to the bank. McLaughlin managed to work a diagnosis as — get this — an asthma victim with reduced lung capacity, qualifying him for an $86,000-a-year disability pension.

For life.

Free of state and local taxes.

Not that his diagnosis was particularly unique: Some 80 percent of firefighters and chiefs who retired last year — four out of every five — did so on disability.

Who knew the job was so debilitating?

McLaughlin “is a poster child for what’s wrong with the pension system,” says Carol Kellerman, head of the Citizens Budget Commission.

He’s also a walking (er, running) reason why 56 percent of city voters say union employees aren’t “doing their fair share to ease New York City’s financial problems” — as a Quinnipiac University poll last week found.

Only 31 percent, the survey shows, think they are doing their part.

Even among union-member households, the poll found, 42 percent say public employees aren’t helping out enough.

Overall, more than nine out of 10 respondents say budget woes are “serious”; two-thirds see them as “very serious.”

But has Albany gotten the message?

Hardly. Just look at some of the legislation pushed this spring:

* Some 50 different plans to sweeten public pensions even more.

* A bill that restricts officials statewide, no matter how cash-strapped, from trimming retiree health benefits.

* Legislation requiring firefighters to get 80 hours a year of added training on fire-code updates — meaning 80 hours more of overtime pay.

The bills — to say nothing of McLaughlin’s sweet pension deal — were the handiwork of one or another of New York’s legion of morally corrupt public-employee unions.

They own Albany — lock, stock and campaign contributions.

Happily, the Q-poll data suggest that the public is beginning to tumble to the union nexus, too.

Is it too much to hope that well-deserved disgust at special-interest pandering might knock off an incumbent legislator or two (or more) this fall?

That remains to be seen.

But the public is starting to wake up, and that’s the first step toward reform.