Hostile Takeover...Pensions and Nussle is a Hack

From Chapter 5 of Hostile Takeover on Pensions...

Consider this fact: corporations are not required to set aside adequate money to actually pay the pensions they've promised to their workers. Let's repeat this because, really, it is so appallingly hard to believe, it needs to be said twice: though your employer mayb be promising you a nice pension, federal laws actually permit companies to pocket the retirement money that they should be putting aside to follow on those promises. And boy are they abusing these loopholes to the extreme.

At the end of 2004, the nations 1,108 weakest private pension plans were underfunded by a total of more than $350 billion. In other words, companies had set aside $350 billion less in pension money than they had promised their workers. In just the five years between 1999 and 2004, the number of companies whose pensions were underfunded by $50 million or more grew by 600 percent.

And now on to Nussle. In each chapter, Sirota names a couples hacks, who have been rather awful on the issue being discussed (He sometimes also names heros, who have fought against the hostile takeover by big money.). In the chapter on pensions, Jim Nussle is named as a hack for his work trying to privative social security.

Hack: Jim Nussle, Iowa Congressman
Using Chairmanship to spread fearmongering lies about Social Security.

Iowa representative Jim Nussle (R) is chairman of the US House Budget committee, and in that role he is supposed to speak credibly about fiscal issues. Yet in 2005 he said that "by the year 2042, the entire (Social Security) system, in fact, by most people's definiton of the word bankrupt, would be bankrupt." It was a lie designed to scare people into supporting a Social Security privatization scheme that would give away billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street. But the lie was surprising, considering Nussle had taken more than $180,000 from the financial services industry during his political career. The truth is that the system will be very far from bankrupt in 2042. According to Social Security's own actuaries, if Congress does absolutely nothing, Social Security will still be able to pay 74 percent of its full benefits after 2041 - far from "bankrupt". Robert Ball, Social Security commissioner under both Democratic and Republican presidents, told the New York Times in 2005 what's really going on: "What they're saigint is not true. The program is not going bankrupt."

Read more from Hostile Takeover...
Introduction
Jobs
Wages
Debt