Rick Manning, Americans for Limited Government:
Operating under the benign sounding title, “Create Jobs and Save Benefits Act of 2010”, [Senator Robert] Casey’s [D-PA] bill is actually nothing more than a transfer of approximately $165 billion in Big Labor’s pension debt over to the U.S. taxpayer.
For decades, one of the primary organizing tools used by labor unions has been the promise that their members will enjoy secure pensions upon retirement. Most of these union pensions are held in what are known as multi-employer pension funds. Created in 1974 as part of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, these funds are an agreement between a union and two or more employers to fund the pensions of workers and retirees.
The rub is that if a company goes out of business, their employees remain in the system, and become the remaining company’s responsibility. As these multi-employer pension plans become more and more insolvent, the unions that run many of them do not take the fiscally responsible step of cutting benefits, raising the retirement age, asking the members to contribute to the fund, or, gasp, contributing to the fund using union dues money. Instead, many have just wished that the problem would go away.
Now, the piper is demanding to be paid.
Moody’s rating service has found that large multi-employer pension funds are underfunded by $165 billion. This includes funds that either pay or secure the retirement for many Teamsters, AFL-CIO and SEIU members and other large, politically connected unions. Not surprisingly these unions are using the clout gained from spending their cash on politics rather than pensions to demand a taxpayer bailout.
Enter Senator Casey and his House cohorts in crime, Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) and Pat Tiberi (R-OH), who have a solution. Keep the benefits for the members of the Multi-Employer Pension Funds the same, but have them guaranteed by the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation (PBGC).
Who guarantees the PBGC? You guessed it, you and I, the American taxpayer. Just another proposal pushing one set of favored constituents over the rest that ensures the dizzying growth of our nation’s deficit continues unabated.
If these multi-employer lock boxes are underfunded — and they are, obviously — the question, it seems to me, is who is responsible? Who failed to meet its part of the agreement for funding and why?
If it is the companies who agreed in principle to take on the pensions — and they cannot meet that obligation — the unions can either demand the companies be liquidated to meet those obligations (the net result being a loss of jobs but a payment of retirement benefits as promised) or the unions can adjust demands in a compromise that will maintain corporate solvency and so retain jobs.
Is that about right?
What shouldn’t happen is that taxpayers be asked to make up the difference — in a move that serves as de facto welfare both for corporations AND union workers. Or at least, that’s how it appears to me at first blush.
Those of you better versed in such contractual agreements are encouraged to set me straight.
How are you going to grow the Democratic Party without union subsidies? They don’t even bother to hide it anymore.
By being born, you agreed to pay for everybody else. Commerce clause, textualist-style.
Get with the program. You belong to The State. You just need to relax, bite the pillow, and get what enjoyment you can out of it.
At least they’re not promising to use lubricant anymore.
Something to be said for bending you over and just getting the job done.
Sorry. TRIGGER ALERT!!
Yesterday, Minneapolis managed to pawn off yet another insolvent pension fund on the state as a whole. I can’t tell you how happy I am that I once again get to pay for poor decisions and poor management by people I never voted for.
So good of our local idiots to provide proof-of-concept for the big swindles by their national partners.
Of course, it’s Craft Beer Week. So it’ll be at least another week before I start my special “Guy Fawkes, Except With Competence” revue.
In other words, the calculated, organized, interstate theft of $165 billion dollars. One recommends that Senator Robert Casey [D-PA] be somehow prosecuted for same.
From what I understand about pensions, you are correct. I’m not sure how anyone could draw a line from the pension obligation of the company to the government, unless the government is taking over the company and its liabilities. Nothing else would make sense, legally. Of course, the government is not supposed to OWN any private company or even a piece of one (as stock, for instance), but they can get around that little issue just fine, simply by ignoring it.
I mean, this is RICO, no?
This is not much different than what they did to the automakers for the unions.
These asshats really do not give a flying fuck about simply ignoring laws that get in their way, no?
Can the Democratic Party please just change their name to the “Union Labor Party” and be done with it?
[i]Sheesh.[/i]
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We’ve had the Democrat-Farmer-Labor party for years, Spiny. Can’t see as how it’s made any difference.
Oh, HELLZ no! I just noticed that my rep, Pat Tiberi (R?????-OH) is one of the House rats supporting this?!?!!
Someone’s getting an earful next time I see him in town. If not a sock in the jaw.
Darth – what about that district would lead him to do such a thing?
East side of Columbus, used to be manufacturing base, older population so more likely to be on a union pension or up for one… that’s one thing I can think of.
More voters there than in the more rural parts of his district outside the Outerbelt to the north and east. Maybe he’s decided to be a panderbot. It’ll cost him.
racists
The Mafia Bail-Out Act of 2010.
20 years indentured servitude per pensioner ought to be about right. Auction the rights. Wouldn’t need all those illegals to mow the lawn, watch the precious offspring, or pick the crops for the next 20 years.
Plaintiff: Your honor, my client was struck and negligently injured by defendant Deadbeat. We would like for your honor to have the jury pay my client’s medical bills.
Judge: Sounds good to me.
So let me see if I have this right. The union bosses raided their pension funds, and brought them to the edge of bankruptcy if not at least insolvency, and used all that crazy union pension money to essentially get socialist Democrats elected. And now those same union bosses, with their
activistlobbyist hats on, are trying to get those same bought-and-paid-for patrons to cover for their by having the taxpayers of the US guarantee those raided trust funds?And the most Brilliant!, Ethical, and Transparent! administration-EVAR!, the one that was going to break the backs of “special interests” and eschew lobbyists, is basically OK with this?
And no one is going to jail here, nor are the union bosses that engaged in this con game going to be grilled in front of congress; like so many others have been for far less motivation?
I mean, isn’t there a crime going on here, aside from the ordinary political hypocrisy?
crime inc.
Bob – I would not hold your breath waiting for Weiner or Waxman or Pelosi to haul some union bosses in front of Congress.
Like Capone, may they all die of tertiary syphilis, now.
Rassmussen’s Daily Tracking Poll of the Presidential Approval Index has Obama today at -19, his lowest number yet seen.
It isn’t possible to say what precisely is driving this latest movement (the number was -10 on Sunday, -13 Monday and -17 Tuesday) but I’d venture that Obama’s outburst of anger last Fri. — whether feigned or genuine — against the companies involved in the Gulf oil disaster may have something to do with it. Whadda y’all think? What’s the driver here?
O!’s golf course time?
can you “cap and trade” weiner?
Sdferr – my theory is that particular charade you referenced has much to do with this. At some point, people get tired of being lied to, directly to their faces, and that whole “everyone except me must accept blame now” crap rang hollow. Plus, he is a douchenozzle. When you add that to all we have learned about the needed immediately health care deform, maybe people have had enough.
Plural. Drivers. And the answer is… just about everything the idiot does. The info just keeps trickling down to the least informed slowly but surely.
Is it conceivable that – supposing continued widespread policy failure (do you think the Turkey Brazil Iran fest the other day was all up in Obama’s grill in this slide?), continued abject stupidities in performance from where I’m standing, continued economic ruin, piling higher and higher the inanities de Obama — is it conceivable that by nominating time for the 2012 run the Democrats themselves will throw this imbecile overboard for want of any tolerance for further suffering at his hands? Even?
I retract #30. Sort of a silly answer given the data.
The intent: Scare the hell out of the plebes.
The signifier: Entitlements
The antithesis: Unionistas
The ethos: Concerned righties
The pathos: People will suffer
The logos: Some people have more than others
The bathos: People will die
The chorus: Taxpayers
The signified: Depends on what I point at
The signifier: A mark, like with a Sharpee
The sign: It only said 45mph
Interpretation: Translating one language into another
The cynn: oddly entertaining.
cynn, that’s worthy of grudging admiration.
Grebes, scaring the hell out of one-another.
oh, plebes…… sorry.
On the synchronicity front, David Attenborough is running joke at work lately, sdferr. When commodity traders become agitated, they exhibit the most striking behavior. Let us watch their highly specialized dance.
Sdferr – despite his epic failure, I feel this clown/liar/dirtylittlesocialist will not only be renominated, but re-elected.
Looking askance at JD, sdferr queries, are you high?
Cynn, if things stay roughly steady, would you rather have Obama, Hillary or Name Your Favorite on the ballot in ’12?
bh: I would prefer Obama in ’12. I would assume by then he jettisoned the most noxious members of his inner circle. What the hell was he thinking.
If only Stalin knew, he’d fix it right and proper, eh?
Based on my rigorous polling, I believe Obama will be the Dems’ nominee in ’12.
It’s hard to say, bh. We independents are a tough crowd. Obama squandered a fair amount of capital.
Sounds very Iowahawk-like.
Many hehs to the Iowa man, Spiny. Btw, a gimick that hasn’t been played yet is a meta narrator. A naturalist narrator who spoofs the various schools of narration. From Attenborough to first person drama overlay to sitcoms, there’s many yuks to be had there.
Agreed, cynn. And there are other items on the agenda that might squander that capital even more. My hopes for a Clintonesque pivot are diminishing by the day.
In order to get the control/power they want/need/are addicted to, the Democrat’s leaders have been using high leverage in every way, every thing they can. 2008 was the payoff, jackpot of jackpots, but only for a limited time. All the lesser investors want their payoff too, before the collapse. but because of the leverage there isn’t enough sugar in the world to pay off all the promises.
This is the uncontrolled unwinding of a position that has been “to big to fail” for 3/4 of a century. Right now they are still desperately searching for some trick to bring back the “magic”.
Problem is the entire mess was built on trust. That’s a powerful foundation but once it’s gone there ain’t no getting it back. The “Chicago Way” replaces the trust with greed and fear.
That isn’t stable without some outside source to suck sustenance from. A city can do that, for awhile. A 3rd world nation can also. The USA can’t. There is no host we can vampire to keep the payoffs going.
I like the way cynn blames Obama’s disasters on his ‘inner circle’, as if he didn’t carefully stock it with industrial-grade fascists with zero experience like himself.
Them communist chickens always come home to roost. Just ask Hugo.
Second term? It is possible, especially if my fellow journalists continue to be lazy toads, The current occupant of the Oval Office gets creepier every day. Based on his actions and speech patterns, I am convinced he is using drugs. People under the influence can be extremely persuasive and magnetic…until they come crashing down..And then everyone wants to help. We don’t need this emotional cripple who makes it clear he hates most of us.
That fact that nobody, not opposition, not press, has went after the most blatently corrupt election and fund raising machine in history leads me to not rule out any possibility in 2012. Could Obama win a fair election in 2012? Hell no. Is the election going to be fair? Apparently not.
41.Comment by cynn on 5/19 @ 8:47 pm #
bh: I would prefer Obama in ‘12. I would assume by then he jettisoned the most noxious members of his inner circle. What the hell was he thinking.
That he could fool people like you. He did and he will again.I guess you have to live the Chicago Political Experience in order to appreciate it.
Had a visit by my great aunt yesterday. She told me she had voted for Obama because she wanted a change. I was nice, I mean I hardly ever see her.
But, honestly.
Obama might accomplish in 4 years the fatal torpedoing of this Republic. Why would he need 8 when 4 is sufficient ?
The need to rename this bill The Basic Jobs and Benefits Security Act. Also known as The BJ & BS Act.