Pension pork

摘要

It was a happy Easter weekend for corporate America. On April 10th, president Bush signed into law a bill that lets companies reduce the required contributions to their defined-benefit pension plans by more than $80 billion over the next two years. Airlines and steel companies, already the biggest beneficiaries of a temporary bail-out, snared an additional $1.6 billion in extra pension relief. Already wobbly companies will thus continue to make pension promises they cannot keep. If anything, the new law will make a bad problem worse. As one government official says: "It is smoke, mirrors and politics."