Not all will agree, but what Congress pulled off in adopting the giant spending bill really was a Christmas miracle.
I'm not talking about all of the special-interest provisions in the CRomnibus package. Texan Ted Cruz, for example, was absolutely right to criticize as "corporate welfare" a provision in the legislation to help promote Las Vegas as a tourist destination. That was just garbage.
And that, I'd bet, is exactly how a lot of union pensioners might describe the provision designed to provide some relief to the embattled Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.
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That's the provision that will allow employers to cut retiree benefits to the bone, leaving the old and feeble cold and hungry, their hearths snuffed out by heartless and ruthless trolls.
Of course, nothing about the above description of the legislation is true, despite what you might read elsewhere. (Did you see that headline in the Washington Post? "Your pension could go poof. Do you have a backup plan?" To paraphrase Dick Cheney: what crap.)
The truth is the law will help save healthier multiemployer plans from being crippled by the obligations of their ailing, underfunded brethren.
It's a badly needed life jacket, folks, a rescue plan that, while there are no real guarantees in life, could well spare us another one of those multi-billion-dollar taxpayer bailouts.
Unfortunately, there's a lot about this legislation that has been mischaracterized, if not simply misunderstood.
The thing to remember above all else is that benefits under the new law cannot be cut to any less than 110 percent of the PBGC guarantee.
In other words, retirees in a plan taken over by the PBGC could see lower benefits than retirees in a plan that goes through the process now available under the reforms adopted by Congress.
Moreover, workers and retirees will get their say in any possible cuts, because the law now requires their vote before any changes can be made to benefit levels.
It's also important to note that the reforms adopted by Congress don't all fall on the backs of workers.
The per-participant employer premium will be doubled, from $13 a head to $26, beginning in January.
What happened in Congress was historic, in that we've now reconstituted the Employee Retirement Income Security Act in the most significant way since it was adopted 40 years ago.
No one likes the idea of cutting benefits. But this is fair and reasonable legislation and, despite what its critics assert, there was nothing Scrooge-like about the bipartisan sentiment that made it possible.
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