For forty years it was illegal to cut certain pension benefits. That changed last December when the Kline-Miller Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 was slipped into a must-pass omnibus spending bill, which Pres. Obama signed in order to keep the federal government from shutting down. So struggling pension plans can now petition the federal government for permission to cut pension benefits. (The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation answers FAQs.) On June 19 at the Wall Street Journal, Maxwell Murphy reported on a bill to repeal part of Kline-Miller, quoting AARP senior vice president Joyce Rogers: “Congress’ action [in December] broke forty years of settled pension law and put hundreds of thousands of retirees at risk.” That “forty years of settled pension law” is the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, which Sec. 2 of the bill to repeal invokes: “Section 201 of [Kline-Miller] and the amendments made by such section are...(Read Full Article)