Teamsters pension cuts may get worse — and a U.S. safety net is at risk

Marketwatch reports:

Treasury Department Special Master Kenneth Feinberg has delivered a stinging rebuke to the $16.1 billion Central States Pension Fund’s application to slash benefits at a teetering retirement plan that had not yet collapsed. While greeted with relief by 270,000 U.S. households that faced drastic reductions in their living standards beginning in July, and who were the first Americans subjected to a new law ushered in with little public debate—or even discussion—the decision delays a solution to the plan’s severe funding deficiency. And it all but ensures that ultimate benefit cuts will be even deeper.

Five months before national elections, more than 100 members of Congress lined up in opposition to a proposal that would have reduced pensioners’ monthly benefits by 22%, on average—all the way up to 70%. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren stood on the lawn before the Capitol last month to deliver an emotional, and persuasive, speech that skewered the plan’s administrators and its investment bankers for recklessly losing billions of dollars during the financial markets crisis on low-grade bonds, and equity investments in subprime-mortgage issuers. Warren’s address was based largely on a pair of columns I wrote for MarketWatch that were highly critical of Central States administrators.

A story that will not go away.