Defined benefit pension plans are good for workers. They provide a stream of income to people who are no longer in the full-time paid workforce. The risk of the investment in a defined benefit plan is borne the plan sponsor and not the participant. So, if anything, we in Congress ought to be promoting defined benefit plans. But this is a voluntary system.
Employers are free to start up a pension plan, and they are free to terminate their plans.
Unfortunately, they have doing a lot more of the latter. The most recent data shows that there were barely 42,000 such plans last year. This is over a 60 percent drop in the span of a decade. Tens of thousands of plan sponsors have terminated their pension plans and walked away from the system. We must proceed carefully enough that we accomplish both of our objectives, namely that we increase security for participants so that these problems of disclosure and questions about wear-aways are resolved once and for all.