Here’s the New York Times trying to call the relief plan a swamp-fest because it saved some working people from penury in their old age:
Tucked inside the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that cleared the Senate on Saturday is an $86 billion aid package that has nothing to do with the pandemic.
Rather, the $86 billion is a taxpayer bailout for about 185 union pension plans that are so close to collapse that without the rescue, more than a million retired truck drivers, retail clerks, builders and others could be forced to forgo retirement income.
The bailout targets multiemployer pension plans, which bring groups of companies together with a union to provide guaranteed benefits. All told, about 1,400 of the plans cover about 10.7 million active and retired workers, often in fields like construction or entertainment where the workers move from job to job. As the work force ages, an alarming number of the plans are running out of money. The trend predated the pandemic and is a result of fading unions, serial bankruptcies and the misplaced hope that investment income would foot most of the bill so that employers and workers wouldn’t have to.
Both the House and Senate stimulus measures would give the weakest plans enough money to pay hundreds of thousands of retirees — a number that will grow in the future — their full pensions for the next 30 years. The provision does not require the plans to pay back the bailout, freeze accruals or to end the practices that led to their current distress, which means their troubles could recur. Nor does it explain what will happen when the taxpayer money runs out 30 years from now.
Yeah well, we have time to figure it out and the workers won’t have to live in the gutter in the meantime.
Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio who has been leading the charge to rescue the ailing pension plans, said that including the provision in the relief bill is a “really big deal” for both the retirees who depend on the money and the employers now being crushed by promises they cannot afford to keep.
“It goes back to the fact that these workers didn’t do anything wrong,” Mr. Brown said in an interview on Thursday. “They have earned these pensions.” He added that the pandemic had worsened the crisis facing the plans.
The tone of this story is that it’s some kind of corrupt giveaway to people who don’t deserve it. That’s buillshit. The workers should not have to pay for the fact that our retirement system is screwed up beyond measure when they paid in for years in good faith. This is the right thing to do.
Republicans are having a fit, of course. So much for that newfound right wing populist commitment to the working class.