Betting On One Horse

Yesterday, United Air Lines was allowed to dump it’s pension plan on the federal government. That’s bad news for pretty much everybody except UAL’s accountants and execs: employees and pensioners are going to get considerably smaller payments than they’d been promised, and everybody who pays taxes gets to pick up the tab. A number of other airlines, including Delta and US Air, are considering doing the same thing, and you have to think beleaguerd Ford and General Motors bean-counters are also looking enviously at the massive chunk of accounts payable UAL just scratched off its balance sheet.

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