When govt. raises taxes to pay for public employee union pensions, that is taking from the neighbor.
When the company can not pay for a pension, that means the pension was too generous for the output produced by the company and the PBGC which guarantees the pension, takes tax payer dollars to pay it off.
The way to avoid taking money from anyone is for people to have a 401k. Whatever you put in, you get out.
If taxes are being raised for any reason, it is being done by elected officials and you do have recourse in the matter, vote them out.
Pensions are being dumped onto the PBGC, in many cases, by corporation wanting to simply off load their agreed to responsiblity with their employees.
Pensions were offered,for decades, in lieu of greater wage increases and corporations knowingly failed to properly fund the pensions, which now causes self made problems for the corporations that underfunded the pension plans.
In many cases during the merger activities of the 80s, pensions were taken by the corporate raiders and used to pay down debt before the business was broken up and sold. The employees and retirees were left with nothing.
Sorry management, not pensions, is the bane of American business.