What is MAP-21 and Will it Help the Economy?

Pensions are covered in the Level 2 CFA curriculum and are considered by many to be one of the more demanding topics to learn. While the concepts of PBO and pension expense and the expected value of planned assets are still flowing in and out of my consciousness, I happened to read about the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, otherwise known as MAP-21. President Obama signed this act into law on July 6, and while the majority of the act focuses on other things, a small portion of it has to do with pensions and is an update of the Pension Protection Act of 2006.
 
What I found most surprising about what I read was that the federal government, with a little lattitude, decides on the discount rate that a company uses to determine its pension expense for a given period. I had made the erroneous assumption that companies decided upon the discount rate on their own, without government influence, so that if Company A were to choose a higher discount rate than Company B, its management was being more aggressive than the management of Company B.
 
I would think that the more conservative Company B would be producing the more reliable pension expense, but now it appears that the federal government is encouraging companies to be more aggressive, giving them the option of using a discount rate based on a 25-year average as opposed to a 2-year average if that rate is higher.

Why would the government be doing this? If the discount rate is very low, as it is right now, PBO will be very high (unfairly high, some will argue). By using a rate based on a 25-year average, companies will not be obligated to delegate as much money for its PBO, freeing that money to be used for other things.
 
But isn't transparency what we're all aiming for? Isn't this new act a way for a company to, in essence, lend money to itself that it needs to pay back at some point in the future? Why encourage this sort of behavior?
 
Maybe the 25-year average will provide a more accurate projection of what the next 25 years will bring. At some point in the next few years, interest rates will go up, which means that the previous 2-year average, in this environment, would provide a poor estimate of future rates.

According to NYSSA (New York Society of Security Analysts),
 

A general rule of thumb is that a 100-bp increase in discount rates translates into a 12% reduction in projected benefit obligation (PBO). If we assume that 136 bps is a good estimate, then PBOs will fall by 16.32%, a substantial movement.

Now for the bad news. The MAP-21 law also increases the premiums pension plan sponsors must pay to the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). Moreover, if pension plan sponsors take advantage of the option to temporarily use higher interest rates to lower their minimum funding requirements, that move will increase the plan's unfunded liabilities, thereby increasing the PBGC premiums the company must pay.
Under the law, the flat-rate PBGC premium will increase from current $35 per-participant currently to $42 per participant next year and $49 per participant in 2014. The variable-rate premium, which increases as unfunded liabilities increase, will go up from $9 per $1,000 of unfunded vested benefits to $13 per $1,000 of unfunded vested benefits in 2014 and to $18 per $1,000 of unfunded vested benefits in 2015. The PBGC will continue to use the interest rates set under prior law to calculate these premiums.

So what do all of you in the WSO community think about MAP-21? Is the increased liquidity a good thing during these troubling economic times? Or does MAP-21 encourage misleading accounting practices?

Note: here's an addendum, courtesy of www.pensionrights.org:

This provision was included in the highway bill, because Congress needed money to fill a shortfall between current gas taxes and projected highway spending. Because contributions employers make to their pension plans are not taxed by the federal government until the benefits are paid to workers, allowing companies to contribute less to their plans raises revenue for the federal government.The pension funding provision is estimated to raise about $9.4 billion over 10 years.

Let's not forget that the act that President Obama signed into law is primarily a highway bill...and that the pension funding provision is yet another tax.