Security Pension

Charles S. Forbes is a 59-year-old Yankee mathematician with a Columbia Ph.D., 20 years' experience in the insurance underwriting business as treasurer of Manhattan's Smyth, Sanford & Gerard, Inc., and an incurable amateur itch for golf and political reform. His fellow New Jersey suburbanites know him best as former president of their State Mosquito Extermination Association. But Mr. Forbes lately shifted his activities to a nationwide field by proposing that the U. S, Congress add a new classification to its liberal pension rolls--Congressmen.

In an article printed in the staid Baltimore Sun, scheduled to be reprinted next month in the Reader's Digest, Reformer Forbes explained and defended his proposal that every Congressman upon election should go on the pay roll for life at his full salary of $10,000 a year. This sure lifetime reward, argues Mr. Forbes, will give Congressmen "social security" that will enable them to stand up against their constituents' demands for pork-barrel legislation, their colleagues' schemes for political logrolling, look at the problems of lawmaking from a national instead of a sectional or partisan point of view. As an insurance man, Mr. Forbes figures that since the average ex-Congressman has a life expectancy of about 20 years, his plan would cost a maximum $10,000,000 annually. As a reformer, he is sure it would save the nation much more, besides encouraging a higher type of citizen to run for Congress and providing a reserve of trained and paid-up personnel for Federal commissions.

Inquiring of a lawyer friend, Mr. Forbes found that there was no legal obstacle to his plan, since Congress has always enjoyed the power to fix its compensation for any session except the immediate one. "I have spent most of my life cussing Congressmen," confesses Charles S. Forbes. "When the pension idea first came to me I laughed; what a joke it was and what an insult to our Congressmen! But the more I think of it, the more I realize that the joke is on us voting consumers, who have been overlooking human nature for 150 years."

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