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Across the United States, 10.8 million workers and retirees belong to about 1,400 multiemployer (union) pension plans.REF These plans are massively underfunded having promised $673 billion more in pension benefits than they have set aside to pay, and now Congress is poised to hand a select group of these plans at least $86 billion in unconditional taxpayer bailouts.
Succumbing to the pressure of unions that failed often recklessly to deliver the secure retirements they promised their dues-paying members, lawmakers have included this pension bailout in the so-called COVID-19 relief package.
Yet these broken pension promises started many decades before COVID-19, and multiple pension-bailout proposals have been introduced, without success, in recent Congresses. The most recently available data showing a $673 billion funding shortfall is based on pensions’ 2017 financial reports.REF Since then, the S&P 500 has increased by more than 50 percent. Yet, most multiemplo