US lawmakers discuss retirement poverty

[flashl]

By Whitney Kvasager
Financial Times
Sunday Aug 3 2008

US lawmakers last month began efforts to revitalise corporate defined benefit plans, amid worries that Americans are not saving enough for retirement. The effort comes as numerous companies are closingDB pensions and offering new employees defined contribution plans, which provide much less in retirement.

A joint economic committee hearing on the issue in early July followed two years after the Pension Protection Act was introduced to ensure companies' pension plans had enough money to pay retirees - a law many say has backfired and helped fuel DB scheme closures. The act took effect this year and, among other things, requires companies to maintain a higher funded status to cover their liabilities.

Lawmakers and the experts they interviewed at the hearing said those closures could undermine the economy.

[valerief]

1. Oh, one wave of poison in our high blood pressure meds and their

problems are over.

Don't groan. It's coming.

[AnneD]

2. They have already posioned...

our Heparin.

[Warpy]

3. "It looks like people failed to save enough to retire like we can"

"Pity."

That's how the discussion went, I'm fairly sure.

Never mind their own policies and/or lack of initiative for the past 39 years have depressed our wages in addition to the cuts we took to fund our pension plans. Never mind that they sat around with their thumbs up their asses while those plans were raided year after year. Never mind that they allowed Greenscam to fiddle the CPI so that Social Security benefits have been whittled down to a little over half of what their purchasing power should be and never mind that they sat around slackjawed while our health care system, never a model of fairness, got completely shredded by for profit sharks.

It's going to be all our fault. You can smell it.