Political Quotes

“there has been a significant development in private pension law this week, and I have come to the floor to discuss it briefly because I think it is something that will be of enormous interest to working families across the country who, of course, have been reading for months now about their pension plans going belly up. These are workers who work hard, play by the rules, hope to have a dignified retirement and have understood that Social Security was never going to cover all of their retirement security needs. So they have sought to have a private pension, and companies across this country have given them the impression--falsely, in a number of instances--that their private pension would be secure and there for them when they retire. One of the aspects of this whole challenge, with respect to pension security, has been to eliminate what I believe is a double standard today in private pension laws. There is in fact a double standard in private pension law because so often the executive retirement benefits get hidden in a lockbox while the worker ends up getting creamed in the process. What we have done, on a bipartisan basis in the Senate Finance Committee, is to say that that double standard, the standard that protects the executives while it clobbers the workers, will no longer be tolerated under our private pension statutes.…”