Reply #49: Corps are selling greed & personal control as offsets to starving at retirement and lower [View All]

net wages -

You say American's have accepted this.

I doubt anyone "accepted" having a wage cut.

There are no downsides to Defined Benefit Plans as long as they are funded - and that is what the 2006 Pension Protection Act now forces.

There is therefore no "downside" to defined benefit plans. They are the only safe way to plan your future retirement with any certainty.

If you know a way to get corporations to deposit 15% of pay for a middle aged workforce, or 8% of pay for a young work force, please reveal it.

Our "pension" system after 27 years of Reagan RW judges telling old folks that there is no cut back in benefits if they accrue less additional monthly income for each year of future service, because the actuarial dollar value has not decreased year over year - thus breaking the implied employment contract of small employer cost at young ages and high employer cost at near retirement ages that was implicit in the defined benefit plan benefit they thought they had as part of the 40 year employment agreement - is now solely a tax avoidance device/major pay increase for highly paid with minimal pay increase for all others system for the owners of under 100 employee businesses. For larger business it is all about screwing the worker to the extent socially acceptable by ones peers - and post Reagan there is no limit. So we have Bush's GDP growth that results in no growth - indeed an inflation adjusted loss of $1,000 per year for the average under $75,000 a year worker(and that is with the fake low inflation numbers that Bush refuses to correct after thousands have pointed out the math errors to this administration).

No one that I have known ever choses to be screwed out of a totally secure government guaranteed defined benefit arrangement so as to have the personal control and security of a brokerage account that is worth half as much and requires investment decisions you either learn how to make, avoid making by accepting safe albeit lower returns, or pay someone else to make who will be wrong half the time.

To say that unions should fight to speed up this screwing because "the American people have clearly decided that is what they prefer" is at best uninformed, and at worst a PR placement from the corporate world.