The Trouble With Pensions Spills Over

I wholeheartedly agree with The Times editorial, “The Flight From Pensions” (May 12), against taxpayers having to bail out companies and their unions.

It’s tough for those affected, but if their union didn’t and still can’t negotiate a solution themselves, why should we taxpayers bail them out? We should have learned by now that bailing out failing companies and their unions just delays the inevitable and unfairly hurts well-run companies and their cooperative unions.

I know. I sadly helped shut down the old American Locomotive Co. in Schenectady, N.Y., when the steelworkers union refused to revise work rules that were too restrictive and too expensive. Interestingly, that resulted in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, the government’s pension guarantee, even though our company did pay all its pension obligations.

Dick Ettington

Palos Verdes Peninsula

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Pensions, particularly overly extravagent pensions based more on recipient desires than actuarial soundness, threaten to overwhelm the financial resources of most private corporations and government entities in the nation. Examining the pension issues at airlines and automobile manufacturers and keeping their fiscal burdens from being transferred to general taxpayers is one thing, but please do not forget what is already on the backs of taxpayers: namely, unbelievably liberal pension payouts offered to public service employees at all levels of the government.

Who, for example, will bail out the complex pension crisis in San Diego, which is largely the result of the politically influential government employee union’s negotiating power over local elected officials and administrators? And the state of California is today only one or two steps removed from the sort of overall pension payout crisis exhibited in San Diego.

Daniel Eliason

Santa Barbara

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Re the editorial on pensions: Your excellent analysis is gutsy. When will our leaders, not to mention ordinary citizens, grow up and proclaim: We’re broke! We’re financially busted!

Let’s make some difficult choices and sacrifices and do something about it. We are living in a financial bubble. Will we follow through and make those difficult choices and sacrifices?

David M. Herman

Westminster