Taxpayers are bailing out a Pittsburgh-based pension plan to the tune of $260 million. The announcement came last Wednesday from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.
The IUE-CWA Plan was facing insolvency by 2030. It covers about 14,000 workers and retirees in various manufacturing concerns. Of that, about 2,400 are in Pennsylvania with about 150 locally.
The bailout allows for full benefits to be paid out over the next 20 years.
Well, isn’t that sweet? Gee, the least the government could have done is to pare the benefits so the sting of the shaft to taxpayers was just a wee bit less, eh?
And what happens after 20 years? Another bailout?
The money comes from the Biden administration’s nearly $2 billion pandemic-inspired “stimulus” plan. “Stimulating” the economy with tax dollars, of course, is folly. But we can imagine the folks behind this latest in a long line of tax-dollar giveaways hope it stimulates something else on a certain November day in 2024, right?
“Everyone, after a lifetime of hard work, has earned the right to retire with dignity,” U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, an Aspinwall Democrat, told the Post-Gazette.
Since when should taxpayers be expected to pay for others’ “dignity”?
Added U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, the Scranton Democrat:
“This is a simple proposition for the American people. When someone is provided a pension, which is a promise, we have to make sure it’s fulfilled. This is a promise that was earned by the sweat of these workers.”
No, Senator, “we,” the taxpayers should not have to; the charlatans who made the promise must. By the way, some of those mountebanks made lofty pension promises in lieu of pay raises knowing full well they could not pay such enhanced pensions.
And taxpayers should be an accessory to such charlatanism? We think not. But it happens, over and over again. And taxpayers have been robbed at government-point of billions of dollars of their hard-earned wealth.
What about their dignity? What about their sweat, Senator?
Organized labor has devolved into nothing less than a nefarious cartel that continually shakes down the public kitty for its sole benefit. Organized labor’s practices are not sustainable, as bailout after bailout keeps showing. And that’s nothing less than government-sanctioned theft.
We’ll take our leave from this At Large with the profound thoughts of late, great economist Milton Friedman from his seminal work, “Free to Choose”:
“When unions get higher wages for their members by restricting entry into an occupation, those higher wages are at the expense of other workers who find their opportunities reduced.
“When government pays its employees higher wages, those higher wages are at the expense of the taxpayer.
“But when workers get higher wages and better working conditions through the free market, when they get raises by firms competing with one another for the best workers, by workers competing with one another for the best jobs, those higher wages are at nobody’s expense.
“They can only come from higher productivity, greater capital investment, more widely diffused skills. The whole pie is bigger — there’s more for the worker, but there’s also more for the employer, the investor, the consumer and even the tax collector.
“That’s the way the free-market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people. That’s the secret of the enormous improvements in the conditions of the working person over the past two centuries.”
