Biden the Bailout King is at it again

The TARP and Covid bailouts were arguably necessary as a tool of economic stabilization due to systemic widespread economic risk. I still don't have a feel for how appropriately the characterize the most recent so-called bailout which is the subject of this thread, as it is part of a guarantee process and the term was used to be provocative rather than illuminate. But it certainly didn't represent addressing the same type of systemic economic risk. At the same time, it was more defensible both in legal terms as it was a guarantee and in moral terms as it was guaranteeing the payout of previously agreed upon and planned for and relied upon retirement payments. But the pain caucus would have liked to see the suffering because of who they identified as the beneficiaries. But I don't think they're necessarily comparable

 

what isn't fair is gubmnt bails out worker A but tells worker B to get screwed and enjoy it.

 

before there were unions there were not billions being spent by the gubmnt on workplace safety and other worker protection programs nor was there many job mobility programs or much of the federal and state assistance programs that help underprivileged kids. your cute little meme is worthless other than to promote an agenda with no basis in fact.

 

I would have been shocked had you, orange_and_bluke, NOT given my post a come on man. It’s truly sad you don’t see The Benchwarmer’s post as blatant racist.

 

And why were those protections put in place? Because of the unions standing up to the greedy exploiters at the top.

 

you forgot womens suffrage, santa claus, and the tooth ferry in your propaganda pic

 

the point of my post was that all of his major constituencies got something. Young voters? Student loan bailout. Upwards of a half a trillion.
Union workers? How about a pension bailout? Another 36 billion. Covid bailout 1.9 trillion and that disproportionately favored minorities? Sure. And fun fact, the union portion of the bill was around twice as much as anything Covid related (90 billion to unions total). But 6 billion to rescue nuclear plants and please the environmentalists? Ok.
It’s an endless list of things the rest of us have to pay for when these are largely due to bad decisions.

 

Rewarding your voters, that's cheating!

 

No one is arguing that unions haven’t had positive impacts on society.
The argument is whether they still have the net positive effect they once did. Once foreign competition became a real thing, they lost their bargaining power, but were about 30 years late in realizing it and kept pricing themselves out of the market (union leaders have to justify that 2 hours pay they pull a month!). They helped create their own demise.
In the meantime, they focused on government unions…so as an example now 20 percent of Illinois’ entire budget goes to pensions. And it’s even written into their state constitution that those agreements can’t be modified. So good luck with that.

 

Some people still haven't figured out the country has been hollowed out by capital the last 40 years precise because the labor movement is largely powerless in this country. Weird how thats resulted in massive gains for capital and stagnant wages for workers.

 

Don't tell DeSantis that or the wrath of State government will come down hard on you.

 

And when you try and unionize fast food workers to get to 15 dollars an hour and the owners simply automate it; or steel workers demand an extra 5k a year and the management says “cool, your job will be waiting for you in Mexico” what then?
I haven’t said it was a good thing not have I praised business leaders, they have their own set of problems and I have criticized that here many times.
For purposes of this thread, it’s only that it’s happening and it’s real. And unions were far too late in seeing it, so in a lot of ways made themselves look as bad as the people they were fighting. This bailout is just one more example of it.

 

Thanks for the post. You actually drove me to look it up. I know, I know, just crazy.

This piece is 4 years old, but I found it persuasive and relevant, even if a bit above my head. It looks like there were four issues that made the Central State Pension Fund, by far the biggest fund that needed to be billed out, underfunded and the subject to default and/or unable to pay benefits. One of them has to do with union corruption as you suspected, although I suspect not in the way you suspected.


Two biggest factors were the regulation of the trucking industry in 1980 and UPS exiting the system in 2007. First caused numerous trucking companies to fail in a way that they did not in other regions where they were structured differently, and UPS exiting the system pulled out a lot of resources.

According to the author, whom I found persuasive, the fund might’ve survived have they been better managed. And their poor management did have to do with corruption, but corruption from the 1970s, which meant the Union was no longer in control of their pension fund. It looks like they were managed by independent Trustees, subject to some tax and legal limitations. And they did not downward adjust soon enough. She doesn’t explain that one, so I guess you could blame them for that one although it’s unclear why that’s a union problem.

So definitely corruption in the 1970s. Since then looks like it was running far less corrupt than your average white guy company, which never run from the criminal problems do the rich white guy immunity.

Anyway, that’s what I got from a quick read. I may have missed a few things. But it’s certainly not the image you guys like to paint.

Sure I’m being snarky, but I did find the comment about union from using. We just had a president who basically spent his whole life dedicated to being a criminal, still does, and he still hasn’t faced liability. That really starkly illustrated something those that follow matters have long known, there is immunity for rich white guys. The law doesn’t touch them. DT may have been the worst, but he wasn’t a separate category




Understanding The Central States Pension Plan's Tale Of Woe