Casey to Put Taxpayers on Hook for Teamsters’ Pension Shenanigans

Leave it to the Democrats to find another way to rob Peter (you) to pay Paul (unions). If this bill goes through, you, the taxpayer, will be on the hook for trillions of dollars in unfunded union and government pensions. It is most likely that your pension is no where close to the lucrative benefits that the unions have. Get mad. Read the article and keep it in mind as you vote in November.

Excerpt: Sen. Robert Casey (D., Pa.) and Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D., N.D.) are pushing legislation that would commit taxpayers’ dollars to bailing out the Teamsters’ retirement pension fund. The financial crisis and the Great Recession may have upset your retirement plans, but that’s not reason that politically connected union thugs have to share the pain.

Here’s the deal, as former Department of Labor official Vincent Vernuccio, now an analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, tells Exchequer: Under the Democrats’ plan, the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which is basically a pension-insurance fund run by the federal government, would be able to receive tax dollars to bail out so-called orphan pensions — pensions for which employers have ceased making contributions, usually for reasons of insolvency. Under normal circumstances, PBGC does not use taxpayer money to bail out pensions; it charges an insurance premium to the funds it covers and uses that money to make good on pension obligations if a particular pension fund goes bankrupt. It’s like an FDIC for pension funds: If a fund is sufficiently mismanaged, PBGC can step in, take it over, and take care of its obligations.

The Casey bill would change all that, creating a “fifth fund” within PBGC that would receive taxpayer support. Currently, federal law carefully specifies that PBGC obligations are not obligations of the U.S. government. Casey-Pomeroy would reverse that, mandating that “obligations of the corporation that are financed by the [fifth fund] shall be obligations of the United States.” In other words: You, sucker, are paying the bill.

Casey to Put Taxpayers on Hook for Teamsters’ Shenanigans