Fact-checking “Going in Style”

Fact-checking “Going in Style” August 11, 2017

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMoney_Cash.jpg; By Jericho [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Which we watched last night with the kids in a birthday evening for my husband, after a “date night” dinner out and birthday cake afterwards.  (I’m eating the leftovers for breakfast as I type.)

The premise of the movie is this:  three retirees find that their pension checks have been cut off because their former employer is moving its locations overseas.  No American location, no one to pay the checks.  And at the same time, the pension fund is being dissolved to pay other debts, which the other villain in the story, the bank which is foreclosing on the home of one of the protagonists, is administering.

This is all well and good as an explanation for why these men (who happen to be Morgan Freeman and two others) were morally justified in robbing a bank.  They also show them doing a calculation of how much they’re owed, and giving the rest away.  And the movie is entertaining enough, and I understand that movies, in order to tell entertaining stories, aren’t always accurate and factual.

But at that point when they fleshed out this plot point, I really wished they’d have put a footnote on the screen:  “*Note:  companies can’t actually do this; we just need to show this happening to develop the plot.”

Perhaps all my readers already know this, and it’s kind of out of date by now anyway, but I do want to just put this out there, anyway:

The events the movie portrays could not happen.  Pension funds are dedicated for the purpose and cannot be used to pay other creditors.  And if a company does go belly-up and terminate the pension plan, a government agency, the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation or PBGC, steps in to take over the pension fund and cover any shortfalls, with money that comes from “insurance premiums” paid by all pension funds in the U.S. for this purpose.

OK, now I feel better.

 

Image:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMoney_Cash.jpg; By Jericho [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons


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