From: "Rich Gauszka" 


"Antti Kurenniemi"  wrote in
message news:44203821{at}w3....
> > Antti Kurenniemi
> (Everything for the big businesses - screw the people and their
> well-being, that's the future)
>
>

Big Business is now screwing our pension protection

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/business/19pension.html?_r=1&hp&ex=1142830800
&en=0e0f6f1b696f3337&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=login

With a strong directive from the Bush administration, Congress set out more
than a year ago to fashion legislation that would protect America's private
pension system, tightening the rules to make sure companies set aside
enough money to make good on their promises to employees Then the political
horse-trading began, with lawmakers, companies and lobbyists, representing
everything from big Wall Street firms to tiny rural electric cooperatives,
weighing in on the particulars of the Bush administration's blueprint.
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.

That shortfall raises the specter of more pension plans failing, pushing
their liabilities on to the government, according to the agency and critics
of the bills. And some companies with fully financed pensions feel unfairly
penalized by having to pay higher pension premiums to make up for others'
shortfalls.

"It takes a better economist than me to understand how reducing
contributions by that much is going to protect benefits and put the system
on a sounder footing," said Jeremy I. Bulow, an economist at Stanford
University.

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