I’m all behind the fight to keep Wall Street’s hands of Social Security but there’s a more silent attack on retirement: the destruction of the private pension system. Though I’ve written about this before, I was reminded of the problem today after reading Mary Williams Walsh’s piece in The New York Times on the government’s move to take over a United Airlines pension plan.

The story goes like this: United, like a lot of corporations, preferred to pay its top executives boatloads of money when times were fat, rather than fully fund workers’ pension plans (unfortunately, though not surprisingly, the law let them get away with this little trick). So, now, one of the plans is about $3 billion short and going even further into the red. In comes the government–specifically, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which is essentially a government agency acting as an insurance plan funded by companies–and takes it over. The PBGC is already looking at tens of billions of dollars of potential liabilities for pension plans ready to go belly up, which means it might not have enough money in the coming years…and, guess what? That’s going to end up as a whopping taxpayer-funded bailout a la the savings and loan industry. You and I will pay for this fiasco. And, remember, some people may pay twice–the workers who gave up wages today so they could have a pension tomorrow, who will also shoulder the bailout as taxpayers.

As Walsh Writes, “If the government does take over this pension plan, some of its 36,000 participants will lose a portion of their benefits.” that would cost workers about $800 million, “with different people losing different amounts, depending on factors like age,” writes Walsh. Ain’t America great?

The deeper distressing trend is that the traditional pension system is dying. Over the past 25 years, there’s been a drop in the number of pension plans that guarantee a benefit—so-called “defined benefit” plans—in favor of the “bet-your-future-on-the-stock-market” IRAs (so-called “defined contribution” plans because you might know what’s going in but you never know what will come out when you’re old and sick. Check out this graph (courtesy of the Economic Policy Institute): that pink line shows how the casino-type pensions have increased between 1979-1998, and the situation has only gotten worse.