business

UM, I wonder where the drum beat of pay your fair share will come from? Surely it will not be from the pensioners. While the rest of us non union, non pension people work past our 70's while they retire at 55! FAIR SHARE

Absolutely NO WAY will my tax dollars go to pay someone elses PENSION. I will quit paying taxes altogether and will lead a movement to starve the Federal Government of tax funds..., they can't put us all in jail. Better start reducing the amount of pension money paid out because if your company went bankrupt and you lost your pension, that ain't my problem now is it, why the Fed's ever said they would cover that is ridiculous...OH YEAH that was to BUY votes...

$34 billion is half of what Obama is expecting to get from his tax increases on the "the wealthy". There will be a lot of pensioners out in the cold in the coming years. The money is just not there. The government will have to print it off to make the pension payments and printing that much off will make the currency worthless.

Dear taxpayers, We promised ourselves too much therefore we would appreciate it if you picked up the tab on this on. We'll get you next time. Signed, Public Sector

Very bizarre. The critcism should be directed at the private sector. The private sector set up these pensions and made promises to its workers that the workers relied on for their retirement. Conservatives fight efforts to make private companies deal realistically with their promises. A worker that relies on company promises should not be left to the wolves when it turns out the promises were lies and the owners grabbed aall the money for themselves.

Just one more story that seemed to break right after the election....

If you want to know how this happened, read "Retirement Heist".

As a taxpayer, I can honestly say I never saw this coming. Honestly; never saw it coming. Luckily for me, Santa will be here in a few weeks and I'll feel all better.

I've been waiting for the media to pay attention to this for a very long time.

Here's what's going on. For almost 20 years, the Federal Government has been allowing private employers to wildly underfund their pension obligations. A company offering a pension plan has to estimate how much money in guaranteed obligations they will have at X time in the future. Then they have to figure out how much money they have to put in now in order to have the required amount of money to pay out in the future. Usually that money is invested in the bond market, for a long time.

In the 1990s, corporations influenced the government pension fund regulators to let them pay in less money to these funds, and to use ridiculously optimistic estimates to show that the lesser investments would somehow yield a bonanza in the future. I believe they're allow pretend they think their funds will earn something like 10% per year in the bond market.

Of course their investments, like everyone else's, don't make anywhere near that kind of return. So when they have to pay out on the pension guarantees that are part of their employees' compensation packages, they don't have the money and they just show empty pockets and shrug their shoulders. Then the Pension Guaranty fund has to make the payments.

It's just another backdoor stream of taxpayer money to subsidize dishonest self-dealing in the corporate executive suite, and another way the overall bond market is being looted.

Private employers are using the promise of retirement plans to get workers to accept lower wages. Then they turn around and weasel out of their obligations and dump the expenses onto the taxpayer. Since they've bought off all the politicians and regulators, they get away with it. Same old, same old.

Time to cash out the pensions and convert them to 401k's. Join the rest of us working until we are 70.