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January 22, 2014 at 01:00 AM
Calling it an “important first step” on the long road to addressing this country’s retirement crisis, the U.S. Senate Finance Committee recently held a special hearing on needed reforms for Social Security, defined benefits and private retirement accounts.
The December hearing was called by the Subcommittee on Social Security, Pensions and Family Policy, which includes member Senator Patrick J. Toomey (R-PA) and Chairman Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH). Featured speakers at the hearing included Robert G. Romasco, president of AARP, in Washington DC; Andrew G. Biggs, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC; Dean Baker, co-director for the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington DC; and John F. Sweeney, executive vice president at Fidelity Investments in Boston.
“Today, middle class and low-income seniors rely on Social Security for the majority of their retirement income, while workers 50 to 64 are increasingly unprepared for retirement,” Senator Sherrod Brown warned participants at the hearing. “The challenges facing workers are dire. The vast majority of economic gains in the last 25 to 30 years have gone to those at the very top of the income distribution in this country.”
Senator Brown offered a series of statistics that paint a bleak picture of the ability of today’s senior to face a comfortable and secure retirement.
Consider:
- One-third of Americans aged 45 to 65 have no retirement savings at all;
- Even among workers with a retirement plan, 75% of Americans nearing retirement age have less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts; and
- Among minority workers the picture is especially dire, with 80 percent of Latino workers having less than $10,000 in retirement savings.
“The picture gets bleaker when considering racial disparities in wealth,” Senator Brown said. “Today, the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households.” These numbers represent the largest ratios since the government began publishing this data about 25 years ago, he said.
The unfortunate reality of all of this is that for too many Americans, Social Security is the only leg left of what had been a three-legged stool. The other two legs are personal savings and pension plans.
According to data provided by Senator Brown, the percentage of workers covered by traditional defined benefit plans has declined steadily for 35 years. While there had been 112,000 plans available in the mid-1980s, that number is down to 30,000. Likewise, the proportion of private workers with retirement plans covered by defined benefit pension plans had dropped from 62% to 7% during that period. They have been largely replaced by higher risk defined contribution plans.
With so many Americans now dependent solely on Social Security, the result is that we are stuck in a downward cycle of retirement preparedness.
“Without retirement savings, aging parents become dependent on their working-age children, preventing those children from saving for their own retirement, and perpetuating the cycle of economic distress in the retirement years,” Brown said.
Social Security Solvency
While speakers at the Senate subcommittee agreed that retirement for many Americans is at a crisis point, Social Security is not yet there, noted Robert G. Romasco, president of AARP.
“According to the Social Security Trustees, even with no changes at all, Social Security has sufficient income from payroll contributions and assets in Treasury notes to pay 100% of promised benefits for the next 20 years, and can continue to pay approximately 75% of promised benefits thereafter,” Romasco said. “Social Security is therefore not in an immediate crisis, but the projected funding gap should be closed.”
Romasco said AARP is especially concerned with suggestions that Social Security benefits be reduced in order to help reduce the federal deficit.
“Social Security is a separate, off-budget and self-financed program with its own dedicated funding source and it is not the cause of our federal deficits,” Romasco said. “There, AAPR strongly opposes cuts to Social Security in order to reduce the federal deficit.”
What the AARP does support is the Auto IRA proposal. Several state legislatures are currently considering Auto IRA programs, which enable workers that don’t have access to an employer plan to fund their own retirement plan account through voluntary payroll deductions, Romasco said.
“Harnassing the power of regular, automatic payroll deductions at work can encourage and simplify saving and significantly improve the retirement security of millions of Americans,” Romasco told the subcommittee.
