The Ways and Means Committee of the House just approved a bill for a big taxpayer bailout of private multi-employer/union-sponsored pension plans. Many of these plans are hopelessly insolvent. In other words, they have committed to pay employee pensions far greater than they have any hope of actually paying. In the aggregate, the assets of multi-employer plans are hundreds of billions of dollars less than what they have solemnly promised to pay.

There is an inescapable deficit resulting from past failures to fund the obligations of these plans. This means somebody is going to lose; somebody is going to pay the price of the deficit. Who? Those who created the deficits? Or instead: How about the taxpayers? The latter is the view of the Democratic majority which passed the bill out of committee in a 25-17 straight partyline vote on July 10.

“Wait a minute!” every taxpayer should demand, “aren’t all these pension plans already guaranteed by an arm of the U.S. government?” Yes, they are–by the government’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). But there is a slight problem: the PBGC’s multi-employer guarantee program is itself broke. It is financially unable to make good on its own guarantees. The proposed taxpayer bailout is also a bailout ofthis deeply insolvent government program.

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