Hey Rubes, The GOP is selling out your pensions now

With the bankruptcy of major pension plans and the government program to protect pensions about to go bankrupt itself Congress was directed to make fixes. After being passed around to the corporate lobbyists the new GOP plans cut pension protections, reduce the amount of money going to the system, and let the corporations rewrite the rules. Is there anyone out there who is surprised at this?

In the end, lawmakers modified many of the proposed rules, allowing companies more time to cover pension shortfalls, to make more forgiving estimates about how much they will owe workers in the future, and even sometimes to assume that their workers will die younger than the rest of the population.

On top of those changes, companies also persuaded lawmakers to add dozens of specific measures, including a multibillion-dollar escape clause for the nation’s airlines and a special exemption for the makers of Smithfield Farms hams.

As a result, the bill now being completed in a House-Senate conference committee, rather than strengthening the pension system, would actually weaken it, according to a little-noticed analysis by the government’s pension agency.

The agency’s report projects that the House and Senate bills would lower corporate contributions to the already underfinanced pension system by $140 billion to $160 billion in the next three years.

This New York Times review of the changes is hardly balanced as only supporters of the GOP plans provide arguments FOR the changes they are making with no responses from opponents. This pension plan overhaul is another in a series of hundred billion dollar corporate giveaways that have taken place recently under GOP House and Senate leadership.

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