« One-Way Complaints | Main | Tuesday QT »

What's a Pension?

In this day and age, just another contract to ignore, apparently:

At a time when scores of companies are freezing pensions for their workers, some are quietly converting their pension plans into resources to finance their executives' retirement benefits and pay.

In recent years, companies from Intel Corp. to CenturyTel Inc. collectively have moved hundreds of millions of dollars of obligations for executive benefits into rank-and-file pension plans. This lets companies capture tax breaks intended for pensions of regular workers and use them to pay for executives' supplemental benefits and compensation.

The practice has drawn scant notice. A close examination by The Wall Street Journal shows how it works and reveals that the maneuver, besides being a dubious use of tax law, risks harming regular workers. It can drain assets from pension plans and make them more likely to fail.

Seriously, do they want a class war?  Or are we supposed to keep ignoring this?

Don't forget your torch & pitchfork at the door, kids...

Post a comment

(Your comment will be published if it resembles anything approaching sanity. Or not. Thanks for commenting in either case. ~Earl)