Americans lose when Congress is in the business of picking winners and losers.
Just this week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell signed onto a bill, the Bipartisan American Miners Act of 2019, that would bail out one multiemployer, or union pension plan.
This Senate bill is similar to the combination of two bills in the House—H.R. 934 and H.R. 935, the Health Benefits for Miners Act of 2019 and the Miners Pension Protection Act—that the Energy and Natural Resources Committee recently passed.
There is a lot of misleading and false reporting about what these bills would do.
Here’s are six things you need to know:
- This is a Taxpayer Bailout. Not one penny will come from the Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Fund. The United Mine Workers of America already uses up the entirety of the available Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Fund for its unfunded health benefits. In 2019, the Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Fund will provide an estimated $68 million for these benefits while taxpayers will pay the remaining $270 million for the United Mine Workers of America’s broken health care promises. Thus, every additional dollar of pension and health benefits provided to the United Mine Workers of America through this measure (up to $750 million annually) would come from taxpayers.
Read the full story from The Daily Signal
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