As more and more print newspapers are struggling to stay afloat in today’s predominantly digital media world, they are trying to come up with creative ways to cut costs.

And some of them have found a potential lifeline in their workers’ pensions.

In the name of “saving” a small group of community newspapers, a provision of a bill called the SECURE Act allows these newspapers to reduce their contributions to their workers’ pension plans while still promising the same benefits.

The problem? You can’t reduce compensation costs without reducing actual compensation. In the end, this measure hurts the very workers it purports to help.

Under current law, if a pension plan is failing to meet its funding target, the plan sponsor must eliminate the funding shortfall through additional plan contributions and associated interest at a discounted rate over 7 years.

The SECURE Act, however, changes that time period to 30 years and allows plans to use a higher discount rate for contributions.

As a result, it would decrease the amount that these newspapers are required to contribute each month; and, because of the longer payback window, would also make it less likely that they would ever make up the shortfall.

In other words, it grants a special-interest bailout to these newspapers by allowing them to raid their workers’ pensions.

This is both bad policy and bad precedent.

It’s true that this strategy might help prolong the life of these community newspapers in the short term. But it would do so at the expense of their employees, the government’s Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), and all the other private pension plans that are not afforded this special treatment.

Because when the pension plans of these select newspapers inevitably become insolvent, they will most likely end up in the PBGC – a federally chartered organization that provides pension insurance through premiums paid by private companies, half of which are small companies with fewer than 25 pension participants. So, in the long run, all the companies required to pay into the PBGC – but which do not receive a special bailout from Congress – will be forced to bear the brunt of the cost.

This is neither helpful nor fair.

That is why I am offering an amendment that strikes this provision from the bill.

We should not be providing special treatment to a select group of community newspapers at the expense of others.

And we should not be setting a precedent that struggling companies can offload their costs onto their workers and other companies by shortchanging pensions, failing to pay them back, and getting bailouts from Congress.

We can find better ways to help keep struggling newspapers alive without raiding hardworking Americans’ retirement money. This amendment would ensure just that.

Many Americans might be surprised to find out that most of the land west of the Rocky Mountains is owned by the federal government. In fact, if they were to look at a map highlighting this land, they would see that more than 50% of it is owned by the federal government. In Utah, the percentage is even higher: the federal government owns more than two thirds of the land.

For our state, and for other states in the West, this presents some unique – and very substantial – challenges. Chief among them is the fact that the federal government has deprived states, counties, and local jurisdictions from the ability to collect property taxes on this land. And unlike other property owners, the federal government itself does not pay property taxes on the land that it owns in these states.

The result?

Many areas with high concentrations of federal land are impoverished. Without a property tax base, these communities are deprived of money vital for funding local schools, building roads and public infrastructure, and paying for firefighters, police, and search and rescue services.

That’s where the Payment in Lieu of Taxes program comes in, or PILT. The federal government created this program to offset some of the disproportionate burden placed on the shoulders of public lands states and communities by providing funding to help compensate for the loss of property tax revenue.

So each year, the Department of Interior calculates each county’s annual payment by taking into account its population, the amount of federal land it has, and receipts it has from other revenue-sharing programs. Since its inception in 1977, PILT has distributed more than $8.5 billion to 1,900 local governments across the country.

The problem, however, is that PILT funding has historically been woefully inadequate. PILT payments have unfortunately tended to be a small fraction of what state and local governments could generate through property taxes if they owned the land within their borders.

This yet again unfairly affects rural, vulnerable communities who are struggling to fund their schools, infrastructure, and community services.

That’s why, as I continue to represent the state of Utah in the Senate, I will keep working to ensure that the PILT program remains in existence; and to increase its payments so that it reflects at least a rough equivalent to the amount of money that the taxing jurisdiction could would collect at its lowest rate.

It’s only right that we ensure that the citizens of Utah, and our public lands states generally, have the means they need to both survive and thrive.

Construction is one of the most important industries in our economy. It provides much of the infrastructure needed in our daily lives, and it’s a huge source of jobs in our country for both high and low-skilled workers.

Unfortunately, there’s an 80-year old wage subsidy law on the books that is artificially inflating costs of federally funded construction projects on our nation’s infrastructure – costing taxpayers billions of dollars and unfairly discriminating against low-skilled workers.

The Davis-Bacon Act, (DBA) passed by Congress in 1931, requires that federally-funded construction projects worth more than $2,000 pay workers at least the “prevailing wage” rate on non-federal projects in the same locality. In the midst of the Great Depression, the act was intended to prevent the purchasing power of the federal government from driving down construction wages.

However, the “prevailing wage” is determined not by market forces operating in reality, but by federal bureaucrats operating in Washington, D.C. An agency called the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) surveys construction wages and publishes prevailing wage determinations for each county in the United States, which federal contractors are then obliged to pay each class of worker.

But the WHD is an enforcement agency that has no expertise in accurately calculating wage rates, and which uses faulty and unscientific methods for its surveys. In fact, the WHD prevailing wage rates are usually inflated union wages based on self-selected survey samples that reflect only a small number of worker responses.

The result? In most cities, DBA wages are wildly out of touch with the prevailing market rates. In some cities, DBA rates are more than double market wages. In others, DBA rates are the minimum wage. On average, federal contractors are charged a 22 percent premium on their labor costs above what private companies pay for the same project.

This has wasted far too many taxpayer dollars.

One study found that Davis-Bacon requirements cost U.S. taxpayers an additional $8.6 billion annually and increase the costs of federally funded construction projects by 9.9 percent. It’s estimated that in just 2010, repealing Davis-Bacon would have saved taxpayers $10.9 billion and could have employed another 155,000 more construction workers.

And since DBA requires that they be paid at the same rate as skilled workers, it has also disincentivized federal contractors from hiring and training low-skilled and non-unionized workers. It prevents them from getting a fair shot a job, and instead funnels money to prop up big labor unions that can keep up with DBA wage rates.

It’s about time that we lift these outdated, unfair, and costly requirements off the books, which is why I will soon be introducing a bill to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act.

By doing so, we will save taxpayer money, allow construction money to go farther for our infrastructure projects, and create more jobs that will be open to workers of all skill levels.

The American economy is thriving. The current economic expansion is the longest in U.S. history. Our unemployment rate has remained below 4 percent for the past 18 months. In recent years, we’ve seen consistently solid GDP growth and job creation.

Yet, for many parents across this country, raising a family is harder and more expensive than ever. The New York Times recently surveyed adults 20 to 45 who were parents or planned to be. One in four had fewer children—or expected to have fewer children—than they considered ideal. Economic concerns were foremost among the reasons that they fell short or believed they would.

It shouldn’t be this hard to raise a family.

There must be some things that the federal government can do, or at least do differently, to make it easier for Americans to raise their families. The Joint Economic Committee held a hearing to explore possible reforms this week in Washington, D.C.

Ryan Bourne of the Cato Institute testified that many existing regulations unnecessarily drive up the costs of essential goods and services that families depend on. Restrictive zoning laws have been shown to raise the cost of housing, staffing regulations drive up the costs of child-care, and subsidy programs drive up the price of staples like milk, sugar, and corn.

Mr. Bourne estimated that these regulations cost the typical low-income family anywhere between $830 and $3,500 per year.

Lyman Stone of the American Enterprise Institute went even further, noting that the federal government’s tax and welfare systems penalize married working-class families while benefiting wealthier ones. “The eligibility rules for welfare programs generally do not double the eligibility threshold for married couples, nor do they generally double the benefit size. In effect, the Federal government has put its thumb on the scales against working class marriage,” Stone said.

Stone then detailed the effects federal policies would have on a fictional working-class couple with three children making $24,000 and $20,000 who wanted to get married. Thanks to Earned Income Tax Credit benefit phase outs, Affordable Care Act premium phase outs, Medicaid eligibility rules, and other welfare policies, getting married would cost this couple $10,500 every single year!

No wonder working-class families are finding it so hard to get and stay married!

If the federal government’s tax and welfare policies continue to punish working-families who want to be married, we should not be surprised if American women continue to have fewer children than they want and more of those children are born out of wedlock.

We can and must do better. In the coming months the JEC will continue to investigate this issue and identify specific ways we can reform federal policy so that our government can being playing a positive role in the maintenance of the American family.