 Good morning. I like that response. Thank you. I'm so pleased that each of you could come out today. This event is the result of the wise guidance of Fiya Lee from EPI, the fierce and insightful leadership of Randy Weingarten from the AFT, and the brilliance of Teresa Galladucci from the New School. These women see a better future and they make it happen. We all have been working together to demonstrate that there are ways to make retirement not a time of fear but where everyone can breathe easy. Right now this isn't the case. AARP has found that there are three words that give Americans the heebie-jeebies. Retirement, planning, and aging. In fact, 80% of Americans fear retirement than death itself. So we want to get Americans out of the fetal position and say don't worry there are answers. Answers that can make savings easy and simple where you take your savings from job to job and you retire with a monthly paycheck. Half of all Americans right now don't have savings. That is not acceptable. We believe that each person should be able to save where they work and when they retire they can have a monthly paycheck for the rest of their life. And yet right now half of all workplaces don't offer their employees a retirement plan. Half of all businesses in the United States don't you agree that is not acceptable. Already 10 states haven't acted legislation to try to change that and that's great for them and I have to tell you it's great also for the AARP who's made that happen. You can clap for the AARP. We like them. But these benefits aren't portable across straight lines and they don't offer lifetime income. I know because I chaired the task force in Maryland. So we want to need we need federal legislation and we're starting the effort here in this special room. This is very special for me. It's the Kennedy caucus room and I want to thank Senator Ed Markey and Paige Rodriguez for making this happen. The Kennedy caucus room is named as you can imagine for my two uncles and for my father Robert Kennedy. My father launched his presidential campaign here. He said that he wished to run to seek new policies that would close the gap between rich and poor, black and white, young and old. He wanted to stand for hope not despair for the reconciliation of men and I would add for the reconciliation of men and women. I feel his spirit among us today and we have a terrific panel to discuss these solutions. Caroline Atkinson is a marvelous moderator. She was the head of global policy at Google, was the deputy national security advisor for international economics under President Obama and I know her from Rock Creek, the largest women owned investment management firm in the United States. Woohoo! I worked there too at one point. Randy Weingarten is president of the 1.7 million members of the American Federation of Teachers and fights fiercely for students, teachers, parents and a better education. She is also the most passionate person I know for retirement security, how we need to strengthen social security and have everyone have a savings account. She is the reason that I joined our cause. Thank you, Randy Weingarten. Tony James is co-author, along with Teresa, of Rescuing Retirement. He is also vice chair of Blackstone, one of the world's largest private equity firms in the world and he speaks with deep knowledge of how the system must be reformed. We are lucky to have his brains and his commitment to this issue. Thank you, Joan Tony James. Chad Bould is a legislative assistant to one of my favorite senators, Sherrod Brown. He deserves round of applause. He worked at Prosperity Now and is focused on retirement legislation which one of these days he will describe. Doug Callitas works for another fabulous senator, Amy Klobuchar, who has introduced legislation on retirement security. Both Doug and Chad graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where I admit I taught foreign policy years ago. Maybe I'm wrong, I read your bios that way. There will be time for questions and answers at the end of the panel and then Teresa Gerleducci will close. Teresa is terrific. She is a groundbreaking professor who saw that we could make a difference and she showed us how. Thank you, Teresa. There are just a couple of other people I have to thank. Monique Morrissey, who did a lot of the research for this panel today and for all the work that we did and for the great team at EPI who helped assign everybody in and produced all the papers. Thank you, EPI. And now, Caroline, take it away. Thank you so much and thank you. I think we have a round of applause for Kathleen as well. So I'm going to go first to Tony that one of the two authors, Teresa, is the other one of this great book, Rescuing Retirement and ask him what exactly is the problem? Why does retirement need rescuing? Well, that's simple. Let me start by saying that I believe one of the fundamental rights of someone in America, one of our fundamental principles, needs to be that if you spend a career working hard, the full-time job, when you retire, you can retire with dignity. I don't think that's very controversial with any party or anyone. And we're failing in that mission for our people. By 2050, one third of our elderly will be in poverty if we don't change the system. We have lots and lots of baby boomers approaching retirement without the savings that they need to maintain their lifestyle. So the problem is big, it's obvious, it's pervasive. The track we're on dooms a huge number, a third, 25 million of our elderly to not only live in poverty but to spend the rest of their days worrying. We all have parents, we know what old people do, they worry and they worry about money. And what a horrible sentence. You couldn't impose that on people that had done something terribly wrong to say the rest of your life you will live in poverty and worry about it every single day. What a horrible sentence. That's the track we're on and that's what we got to fix. Thanks very much and I've just spent a week with my 91 year old mom who has a small pension and then a subvention from me and my sister. So it is very important. I think many of us older than perhaps the average in this room do help our elderly parents and then we wonder how much our children will be able to help us. So Randy, I have to tell you that one of my two daughters is a teacher in the New York City public schools. Which school? It's called... Tell me later. I'll tell you later. And she will of course look forward to a pension as will your members. So why is this an issue for you and for your members? Well because retirement security is an issue for everyone and you cannot be an island. And what we saw frankly in the last 20 years and particularly at the start of the last recession is that you saw what I call, I'll try to be very careful about this, pension envy. So instead of the fight being how to ensure that everyone had adequate retirement income, there was a fight to try to drop what people had. And what we saw is 30, 40 years ago, 80% of Americans had some kind of appropriate defined benefit pension and now 80% don't. And so our job we feel, I mean it's kind of like, you know, if I had food on my table would somebody actually ask me whether I should be concerned about other people eating? And of course we have to make sure if we want a society with a social contract where we do what Tony just said and let me just also say I've worked, you know, I spent a lot of time challenging people on Wall Street. I've worked with this man. I think what he has done in terms of this work and other work is amazing and this is the kind of social contract that we need to have in America where people regardless of class work together to fight to ensure that there is a ladder of opportunity and a social contract for all Americans. I had to say that. And so this is why we at the AFT about 10 years ago started talking about how can we assure retirement for all and retirement security for all. And it really requires three basic principles. People want to, people are savers if they can. So they want social security. They need social security. Social security has to be a piece of it. Then there has to be some individual retirement account and then savings. And then people can then say, as Tony just said, okay, I have 60%, 70%, 80% replacement income in retirement so that you or me or others are not actually paying our parents every month for their retirement. What happens if they don't have kids that can afford that? Look at what's happening in terms of millennials. Millennials right now have a net worth of about $8,000. So whether you look at it as actually a real interest of all of us to have people have retirement security or very, whether you look at it as a special interest to ensure that people have retirement security, at the end of the day, America needs people to have retirement security and that is what the union movement is about trying to have a better life for Americans. I'll give you one more statistic. For every dollar of retirement security, of retirement income that a retiree has, that produces $2.50 or $2.75 of economic output in a community. So this is good for America, for retirees to have retirement security. It will hugely save people from the anxiety that they have and at the end of the day, it is part of our social contract, as Tony just said, to people who have worked hard for their lives that they can be assured in retirement that they can have a good retirement. Thank you very much, Randy. Routing. And I must say one of the most startling things I heard from Kathleen was this point that more or many people fear retirement insecurity and poverty more than they fear death. That is really a horrible thought here in America. So I want to turn now to Chad and you'll need to have a microphone as well. Thanks very much. And just ask you for your, for Senator Brown, what do you see as the most important, what does he see as the most important principles that should guide any attempt to improve retirement security? Thanks. Sure. And Randy, let me first say I appreciate what you said about millennials. I can never decide how much I want to own that term and the other millennials in the room know what I'm talking about. But I appreciate what you said about folks in my age band. Thank you. Thank you. You're not all slackers. It's not a bad place to be. And in many ways, it's a very bad place to be. But first off, let me say what I say here today is just, me as Chad Bolt doesn't necessarily reflect Senator Brown, although if I'm doing my job, well, hopefully there's significant overlap. But as I think about the answer to the question posed to me, I think back to a white paper that the Senator put out in March of 2017. And that was called working too hard for too little. And the paper is about restoring the dignity of work and the policy changes, retirement security among them that we need to see so that hard work pays off no matter who you are or the work you do. So to zoom out for a moment, we know a lot of people aren't saving because they don't have the disposable income to do it. So if we want to improve people's retirement security, we need to raise workers' wages so they can save more. And maybe that's an obvious point. But since it's not happening, it's probably worth stating. We also need to protect and expand social security. It's a profound social contract, as you've heard already, and we need to honor it by building on it so it continues to be there for people. But to zoom back in on the question, to zoom back in on the question, we know workers need access to an account they can use to save. Some workers have access to that through their employer, but too many don't. So while there's still a lot to work through, we think the idea of a guaranteed retirement account is one definitely worth exploring. And that's an account that is simple. It's a small contribution made from the employee and made from the employer. It's portable and personal, so it's easy to take with you. It's universal in that it's an option, again, an option to the range of workers that we see in today's workforce. It could have a component of refundable tax credits to help low-wage employees contribute, and it should provide a steady stream of retirement income when the time comes. So we really like this idea. There's much to figure out, but we think it could be a big part of the puzzle that helps us crack the code on retirement security. Thanks very much, and we know that there are a number of different proposals for retirement security, and we believe that there are broad, I think the members of the panel believe there are some broad issues and broad principles that unite many of these plans. But I would like to turn now to Doug and on behalf of, or mainly on behalf of, Senator Klobuchar, if you could tell us why did Senator Klobuchar want to make a major retirement proposal a central part of her platform, and what principles does she see as the key ones? Thank you, and I will start by echoing what Chet said before with the usual caveat that these views are my own, and hopefully there will be significant overlap of what Senator believes, but I speak for myself. So just speaking again about what was mentioned before, I mean, three in 10 workers lack access to a plan, and we know that a full 45% of Americans are not participating in a workplace savings plan. The evidence shows that people who do save and workplace plans, that is the only real way to get Americans to save for retirement. We really need to encourage all the Americans who are currently shut out of the system to participate. Now what our bill with Senator Coons would do, it's called the Saving for the Future Act, it would require all employers with at least 10 employees to make a minimum contribution of at least 50 cents per hour of work to a retirement plan for each employee, and this starts small, it's only $1,000 a year, it'll increase slightly after that, and we would also make it to have automatic enrollment, which employees can opt out of, starting at 4% a year and going up to 10%. The evidence has shown that if people start saving early in their 20s, this amount of savings, which is not huge on a year-to-year basis, will produce more than enough income and retirement as a supplement to social security. We go around, we talk to different businesses, and a lot of the larger employers already have workplace plans, that's usually where we see the savings. The biggest problem is with smaller employees, particularly employers from between 10 to 100 employees. That's where we lack the participation and that's where the real crisis is. In order to make it easier for these employers to start participating, this bill would create something called up savings accounts, they will be administered very similar to the same way that the thrift savings plan is for federal workers, and the only thing that employers would have to do would be to make contributions to these accounts, as we mentioned, and facilitate contributions on behalf of their employees. These are fairly simple steps, we think they could in time draw support from both sides of the aisle, but they would have an enormous impact on our retirement saving situation 10, 20 years from now. Thanks very much, and I want to go back to Tony and then to Randy, just to say why is it that we need to push people to save, and which people need to be pushed to save. If they are the lower income or those employed by smaller firms, maybe they can't afford to save, so talk us through that. Sure. Well, first of all, as Doug was saying, most of the workers that don't have access to an employer plan work for small businesses, and the vast majority of those are hospitality kinds of businesses, restaurants, retail, hotels, and so on. And those are near minimum wage workers for the most part. So the cruel irony is the people that most need the help from the employer are also the lowest paid. And many of those people, as a practical matter, live paycheck to paycheck, we all know that. Everyone's, the widely quoted Fed studies that show that 47% of Americans couldn't come up with $400 in an emergency. If you can't come up with $400 in an emergency, you're not going to find $1,000 out of your pocket a year to put into a plan. So these people need help saving. Part of it is they don't have the money. Part of it is Americans natural characteristics of wanting to spend the day and worrying about tomorrow-tomorrow. It's easy to say Americans should have behaved differently, but we have 30 years of history with millions of people to show they don't behave differently. So at some point we have to face reality that Americans need help and encouragement to save enough for retirement because retirement, when you're young, it looks like a long way away, but if you don't start saving early, you will not have enough to get there because you can't suddenly save whole buckets of money at the end of your life and get enough. You have to start early and do it consistently. So our plan is a little different from some of these others, although all these plans have shared sort of four basic principles which I'll come to, but our plan addresses this by taking an existing tax deduction, which is a deduction for 401k payments and converting that from a tax deduction to a tax credit. The problem with the tax deduction approach is, first of all, it goes heavily to the most affluent people, the highest earners, because they have the income to put in it and they pay the highest tax rates. Many of the people we're talking about that struggle to save don't pay income taxes. They pay payroll taxes, they pay other taxes, but not income taxes. So a tax deduction does them no good at all. So what an ironical system. This was a tax credit setup to encourage people to save for retirement. The only people benefiting are the people that don't have to save for retirement because they have enough affluence. And the people that have to save for retirement not only get a little of it, they get none of it, none, zero. So we changed that to make that fairer. We make it a $600 per person tax credit for everyone, Uber drivers to CEOs. Everyone gets the same. For the CEO, it's a drop in the bucket if he wants to maintain his lifestyle. For a low wage worker, that credit invested and matched by employer is enough to give them the retirement security. They need to sustain their lifestyle in retirement. So that's how we address the issue and that's the source of the issue. Thanks very much, Randy. And then what we also do in this plan, and we, you know, and we're very abrasive of this plan, is that there's a match of one and a half percent. So there's a threshold matter for people who are under the poverty line as Tony just described it. And then there's a threshold employers put in one and a half percent and the employee puts in one and a half percent. And then, you know, people who have other kinds of plans, there's an opt-out process where if you have a defined benefit plan, that's the plan you have in lieu of this. But if you don't have a defined benefit plan, the employer puts in one and a half percent, you put in one and a half percent. And this kind of process, you know, you see it sounds a little familiar to Social Security, but it actually, if you look at Australia and some other countries, they have started a process like this years and years and years ago. They are now up to a far higher rate. But what we saw, and we did some polling in 2017, is that overwhelmingly Americans, from millennials to those who are really close to retirement, that that one and a half percent figure is something that they can see saving. And if they see it in their own accounts and they see it grow and they see it as a guarantee and they see the kind of leveraging by having the employer do it at the same time, all of a sudden they start seeing their own accounts grow and grow and grow. And so ultimately this is a piece of the puzzle of what creates adequate retirement income in retirement. And so those of us in the room have said at least four or five times, this is a supplement to Social Security. Now what's the difference between something like this and the 401 plans that exist right now? Two things. Number one, most people who take or use the 401 plans are wealthy enough to use them. And as Tony said, they get tax deductions for it. Most people in America who can't, 40% of Americans can't put $400 together in an emergency. They're not going to be able to find the way to save. This kind of thing creates the kind of way that people can save for retirement. Number two, what we're also seeing is that what this does is that people actually see this has a guarantee by actually doing this and having the savings or having these accounts attached to professionally managed pooled assets. We can create a guarantee. So it does depend on the vicissitudes of the market, whether one day you have $100,000 in your account and the next day you have $20,000 because the market, because you were invested 70% or 80% inequities. So what it does is it actually creates for people, the 55 million people who have no retirement income right now other than social security, it actually creates a way where they can see their account, they can see the savings, they can see it grow, and there is this kind of social responsibility of the employer putting in one and a half percent and then putting one and a half percent. Thanks very much. I want to just go back to Tony actually and say why is it that you make it sound and Randy makes it sound pretty simple and I think we can all understand that putting a little bit of money away on a regular basis is something that one can imagine and it just gets depressing if you've got to a point where you haven't done it and then it looks like a bigger amount. But why is this something that the government needs to help and why is it something that people don't do anyway and also how can we be sure that the money would be there as Randy says in a, what are the mechanisms and I like the comparison to the thrift savings plan which is a former federal government employee I also have. Tell us a little bit about how the security part of this plan for these low-income people. Thank you. Okay, well you've got a few questions in there, right. So why the government involvement I think is where you started. I think what happened, Randy laid it out very well, decades ago the vast bulk of American workers worked hard and at the end of their life they got a defined benefit pension plan. That was a huge benefit and it was hugely important to people's sense of security and I think one of the things that's created the angst in America today is the loss of that sense of security and you'll see it in all forms, we won't have to get into all the different forms that it manifests itself but some of it's obvious and not totally pleasant for all of us. But for whatever reason the economy, the country went away and it had its concept of why not define contribution plans instead of define benefit plans. Let's give the essentially the choices to the employee and take the obligation from the employer. That's kind of seductive in a way but I would say 50 years later it's a failure, it's an abject failure. It really amounted to a massive risk shift from a sophisticated corporation to unsophisticated workers and so what we have is a failed system and because the system is because 401ks have failed people ironically there isn't even market pressure on those employers who don't have 401s to put them in because there's no real benefit from having them. So we're kind of in a vicious cycle and I think it takes some government intervention to solve some of these problems. One of which we talked about already is some people just can't save. In our plan we're not talking about increasing taxes, we're just talking about redeploying taxes that are currently, if you will, tax benefits that are already there. So no more taxes, no increase in the deficit, simply redeploying that. That's one of the reasons why we think that we can get bipartisan support for this. But we do need to help the poorest parts of the workforce save. The other thing we need to do is as you point out, this solution works and it's painless but you have to start early and you have to stay with it and you do have to have, as Randy pointed out, you do have to have the employer chipping in a little bit in our opinion. Or people have to save more and that's hard for the reason we mentioned. But by saving a little bit over a long period of time and riding through the markets ups and downs that you'll have in a career, that has two implications. First of all, if you invest well the money grows by itself. It's not a tax, it doesn't hit the employers, it grows by itself. The cruel truth is the average 401k in America earns between three and four percent a return per year. The average pension fund has earned seven and a half percent a year. Over that compounding over 40 years leaves you with a lot more money if you invest it like a pension plan than if you just earn the 401ks. And then if you invest well, whether it's the through saving plan or a pension manner, but if you invest well over a long period of time, the government can afford to guarantee that you'll at least get out, and this is what Randy was talking about, you'll at least get out of your 401k, your guarantee of retirement can, what you put in. That guarantee gives people a huge psychological comfort but statistically and economically it's costless for the government because the chance is so small that they'd ever have to make good on that guarantee and if they do the amounts are small. So it's kind of, it's almost like magic in a way. And so the way we, the way Therese and I think about this, this is like a pension plan for America, for all workers in America without creating the unfunded liability. And that's the magic and the power of it. Thanks very much. And thanks for that explanation. I want to turn back now to Chad. Can I just say one thing before, which is that how many people in this room know what a defined benefit plan is? Okay. They're well educated in this matter. And so what used to, my point in raising that question is that the simplicity of this was that the employer had a lot of the risk on them, that you would get a formula, you would know if you worked X number of years times that formula, times your final average salary, you would know as a retiree what your income was. That plus social security. There was a sense of a simplicity, what Tony just said about the cost shift is that the employer would spend the time or the retirement system would spend the time figuring out what investments were needed to get to that guarantee. That's completely different than the defined contribution plan, regardless of what's put in. And that is subject to the vicissitudes of who your investor is or what the market is doing. And so what this process that we're talking about goes back to trying to create some degree of certainty, but it actually has one other benefit, which is it's portable. So it's not based upon that one employer, but it actually understands that the fact that a lot of people don't stay with one employer for more than two and a half nanoseconds anymore. So there's a lot, so when Tony says, we've tried to create and you know, Teresa and Tony actually have been brilliant about this, I'm just kind of like one of the supporters of it, but we've tried to create something which is, has some degree of certainty, some degree of security, some degree of shared risk again, which the employers used to do and some degree of a sense of sanity. That's why it is what we think retirement for America. That's great. And thanks very much for raising this issue about portability, because I think that's an important element of this plan. We talked a lot about and Tony and Randy and others have talked about employers putting in money, which sounds a bit like the old days, but when you had to stick with that employer in order to get your defined benefit plan. But one of the key elements of all of these ideas of guaranteed retirement accounts is that it's not one specific employer. And perhaps I wanted to turn to Chad to say, how do you see the relevance of this in today's gig or there is a part of the economy that is a gig economy. I think there's another part of it, which is old fashioned non gig, but with less security than they used to be in the old days and people moving around from one business to another. Thanks. Well, I'm glad we're talking about portability. Just don't ask me how many old 401ks I have sitting in drawers at previous jobs. The number is way higher than anyone working in this space should admit. So not yet rolled into my TSP, but it's on the to do list. So as we think about the onset of the so-called gig economy, I think there are a number of things that we need to do for workers. One is fight back against worker misclassification, which unfairly treats workers who would otherwise be traditional employees as independent contractors. And fixing this, by the way, has the effect of helping shore up social security, because it means that those companies are actually paying the payroll taxes that they owe on workers who should be properly classified as traditional employees. And I really appreciate what the panel has already said about the tax code and redeploying current tax expenditures in a different way that actually helps low-income workers, because I think the second thing is reforming the savers credit. It's a great example of a way that the tax code, I think, good intention just isn't designed in a way that actually benefits people in a way that they can use. And then we've got to do something for the 40 percent of families you heard about from Tony earlier, who don't have enough savings to weather financial emergency. They need a platform to save for emergencies, but then they need the ability to easily translate that emergency savings into retirement savings once they're in a better financial position. So I think those things, in addition to creating an account that it almost is profound in its simplicity, that is geared, you know, in keys off of the employee and not the employer. Those are all things that we should do as part of an above, all of the above strategy, and definitely think some kind of guaranteed retirement account is part of that puzzle. Thanks very much. Yes, Tony. Just want to comment on portability. I mean, it's so important that one's retirement plan be attached to the worker, not the employer. I mean, it seems so obvious, because it's obviously the worker retiring. Every time an employer changes jobs with a 401k, you usually have a waiting period before your eligible be in the 401k. So you lose six months or a year. Every time you change jobs, where you get nothing, even in the employers that have plans. If you have small balances, the employers can push you out of your 401ks. They push you out of your 401ks. Most people just take the money, pay a penalty in taxes, because the paperwork of rolling over is very complex. So the system just defeats everyone if it's not tied to the worker. It just seems so easy. And frankly, I don't know why that has to be partisan at all. Thanks. While you've got the mic, and then I'm going to go to Doug, but while you've got the mic, Tony, I want to ask, you commented on the good returns from pension plans in the past. Why could people trust in this new system that you're proposing that they will get good returns? Who's actually going to do the investing? Because probably those small savers do not want to be pitting in their own skills. No, they shouldn't be. We can talk about, we can bemoan the lack of financial literacy in this country all we want, but that's not going to change it. And even for the most sophisticated and highly educated people, navigating capital markets and trying to figure out how much I need to save, how much I can I spend, what do I invest in, that's really, really complicated stuff. We don't think individual workers should pick their investment strategy and manage it if they want to find, but what we think they should do is pick pension managers, essentially. The thrift saving plan is one of them. The other option we have in our book is by the default plan is the pension plan of your state, whatever your state of resident is, we'll manage it just like they manage the pensions the same way. And you'll have as the, as the, because it's your account, you'll be able to change managers, but if you choose not to, you'll get credible established pension managers managing your money in either the state or the, or the thrift saving plan. Thank you very much and portability obviously will require portability across states. So or maybe you can leave your money in one state even if you yourself switch jobs. So Doug, I'd love to hear from you about maybe the issue on social security that's been mentioned by a number of the, of the panelists here, but I think some people would want to hear why is this in addition to social security or is it somehow going to damage social security? How does one see those two things alongside? Sure. I mean, this is an incredibly important issue. And I think this is one of the first things people think about when they think about, okay, what is the retirement crisis in this country? All of the plans we've discussed today realize that social security is a foundation of retirement and social insurance in this country. And none of these plans would do anything to really touch social security. We need to shore up social security. It's something that my boss cares a lot about. I know something about Senator Brown cares a lot about. And I really hope that Congress takes action to shore up social security for generations. We know that social security provides a standard of living for the poorest Americans when they retire and provide an income base for the middle class. What it doesn't do is allow middle class Americans to maintain their standard of living once they retire. Most Americans, when they think about when they retire, whether it's in their early 60s or later on, they want to be able to maintain the standard of living they've enjoyed over the last 20, 30 years. They don't want to have to worry about having their children take care of them. They don't want to have to worry about every single purchase they make. They want to be able to continue to lead middle class lives. Our current retirement system does not allow them to do that. In addition to shoring up social security, we need to encourage the Americans who are not participating in the 401k system to get involved. There's been a lot of talk today about the way the system is set up, the way that it's onerous for individuals to decide how to invest, how to withdraw, how to decide how to participate. The onus is really on the individual. And while it's great that we have freedom of choice and options, the default rules are extremely important. I think a lot of the plans that we've talked about today would set the default rules in such a way that an individual is easy to participate. There's not a lot of thought or work that goes into it. It's easy when you do the things that workers do nowadays, transition between employers, change careers, have spells without work. The system accounts for that. And if they want to take on more risk or invest in different types of investments, they can do so. But they don't have to make those really difficult choices, which most people are not able to make and don't want to have to make those kind of tough choices. Okay, thanks very much. Randy wanted to chip in and Tony, but I also... Okay, I just want to make one comment about lifelong income because we really haven't hit quite on that. Social security gives that, and that's one of its wonderful things. But it's really important that mentally and emotionally that people get lifelong income. The studies have shown that two equally affluent families, one with lifelong income, one doesn't have. The one with lifelong income is so much happier and physically healthier because of that. So that our plan and some of the other plans, that is a really critical component. And we address that, not to create some big liability that could crush future taxpayers. We create... We address that by having the balance of your retirement account determine the amount of your lifelong income for you and your spouse. So if those people that have worked more and saved more, they'll get a higher lifelong income. And so we don't create that hidden liability that just accumulates. And we also feel like, frankly, this should be paid by the federal government because it's a very inefficient part of the capital markets, the broker's fees are high and the money goes very fast if you're trying to buy private market annuities and then you've got credit risk. And we use the payment system that's of the Social Security Administration. We don't touch Social Security as Doug was saying, but the payment mechanism is already there. All retirees already get monthly checks. So we're just adding our balance to the monthly checks. And from the federal government standpoint, the beauty of this is we become as a country more self-funding of our deficits. So there's a bunch of benefits here that we've baked into this plan. And thanks very much also for addressing the issue of fees and so on, because I think some people can think, well, I may have this pot of money, but if I hand it over to somebody in Wall Street who might not have my best interests at heart or might not be looking out for me, then I may end up paying an awful lot of it in fees. I'm going to turn to questions for the audience from the audience in just a second, but Randy was going to jump in first. Right. So Tony said a bunch of what I was going to say, which is that but remember what we said earlier, that over the course of the last 20 years, particularly when pension systems, why did defined benefit systems go bye-bye? All of a sudden, the liabilities had to be paid for upfront by the consumers, by the current employees, the changing in gap analysis, the changing in a whole bunch of things that the government required then created the cost shift onto individual employees. What this is actually doing, the guarantee, the reduction of fees is that it is actually moving away that cost shift that has been on employees' backs. It's actually creating some predictability, some stability, that you then that you get a guarantee, you know what it is, there because the money is being invested by these bigger pension funds in pooled assets, the fees are going to be as minimal as possible. So the sum of the attributes of the shifting onto employees is now shifted back onto employers or onto the government. And that's a very important way of keeping a social contract to people who have worked their entire lives and should be entitled as a result of that to have a retirement where they do not have the anxiety of being pulporized. Right, thank you. I think a lot of this is about risk and risk shifting and who is able to bear risk and who is able to bear risk whilst maintaining health and happiness and so on. So I'd like to take questions from the audience. I don't know if we're using just these, there's a microphone there and maybe people can, well there's a microphone, no there's a microphone standing, right there's a microphone, well okay thanks. And then people could line up who are able to behind the microphone there. I'm going to take a few questions at a time and then turn to the panel. Thanks very much. Thank you very much. I greatly appreciate the conversation this morning on retirement. I am Mary Collins, I'm Mary Collins and I'm a trustee on the District of Columbia retirement board. I've been on that board for many years and it's a divine benefit. Okay the information was was really great. My question is what is being done to support the defined benefit? All of the things that were said stability, predictability, all of that is necessary. So I'm trying to figure out because everything we talked about this today had to do with the continuation of a defined contribution which costs more to the employer to manage and everything. So why aren't we doing something to shore up more defined benefit plans? And that's my question. Let me rather than dealing with a DC. Let me just do that one. Okay but we have a lot of people that want to talk. I think this is a really important issue so let's see who else has that question and then we'll come back. I won't forget. It's a really critical question. Why are we building up the risky for employees? Why is the panel suggesting a defined contribution rather than doing something for defined benefit? I think you're going to have good answers but let's take some more questions first. Hi I'm Nelmino. I'm very supportive of these proposals and looking forward to hearing more about them but I wonder and I didn't see anything about this in the book about the impact on corporate governance. Your boss Larry Fink has spoken out as if this plan does go through there will be huge consolidation of proxy voting authority and just a couple of entities and as this administration is cutting back very sharply on protections for the beneficial holders like the fiduciary rule and the ability of shareholders to provide oversight on issues like CEO pay I really wonder what in these proposals will protect the right of shareholders the beneficiaries the pension plan participants with regard to corporate governance. Thanks very much. Hi Linda Stone senior pension fellow with the American Academy of Actuaries and a volunteer with Women's Institute for Secure Retirement. This plan is based on workers being in the workforce participating as you know women because of caregiving issues may be out of the workforce you know 10 years older employees may be involuntarily exited from the workforce so just interested in how the plan would address those kinds of situations. Thank you. Thanks. Okay well I'm writing them down so I was going to remind you so don't worry about that. Dr. Elaine Cireo I'm the associate rector of a private university in Kiev Ukraine but I live and work here in Washington D.C. I'm interested in knowing how would you could you expand upon the point of how this protects in the employees in a pension fund a lot of pension funds have been known to when companies are merging or closing their pension funds get transferred gutted and the employees are left with nothing what does this do to protect the employees under those circumstances thank you. Thanks I think one brilliant thing about this plan is it's tied to employees and not employers so you get around from that question. Hi thank you all very much my name is Dr. Mindy Reiser I'm a sociologist and on the board of governors of the Labor and Employment Relations Association a national organization with the DC chapter. I want to just add a cautionary tale I support the ideas and the energy but let's not forget for example affordable housing is a crisis in this country which means people simply can't say because they can't pay their rent or they pay their rent and they don't have anything left over. There is talk as well about a basic guaranteed income some of the presidential candidates have talked about that how would that play out in some of the ideas that you're you're putting forward so my caution is let's think of a whole of government approach to dealing with these issues I think some of our labor unions and Randy might certainly know something about that are concerned about all these elements that make for a decent life retirement is one but these other components cannot be forgotten thank you. Right thanks very much and then I'll take the last two questions and remind all the panelists of course yeah there are many things that we all want to improve so it's a question of whether you take them one by one or try to address everything at once. All right good morning my name is Arun Murli there I'm the author of a new book 50 States of Grey about the retirement crisis Tony I'm not sure if you're aware but Professor Franco Modigliani and I in 1997 recommended the guaranteed return approach to solving social securities problem and we actually implemented a version of it at the World Bank and it fails pretty badly because one the guarantee that you claim is very low cost we couldn't get a single private vendor to bear that guarantee which means then the employer has to do it but secondly I think that's also why Connecticut and California rejected that as part of their design of their retirement system I think there's a better way to get guaranteed income which doesn't require a guaranteed return and I'm happy to talk about it offline thank you. Thanks very much. Hi Dr. Lawrence Rich retired college professor the thing that disturbs me is that the bottom line is that we're talking about private industry funding this and every any economist will tell you that there will be either a crash call it a downturn call it what you want and this is going to affect the fund. Thanks very much so just to run through these questions I think they can be to some extent grouped one is why are we supporting reinforcing defined contribution plans rather than defined benefit plans and I think that links in with what about the guaranteed income sorry Randy but I think you can take those together well but this is so let me make a caveat here this plan is sits on top of the plans that we already have there are many of us that want more defined benefit plans and so the first question I had to Tony and to Theresa was what happens with defined benefit plans the more we have defined benefit plans the less need we have for this but the absence of 55 million people have nothing I'm going to say that again 55 million people have nothing and so for me as a labor person I can't wait till we have a government that believes in everybody having replacement income of 90 percent in order to do something this has to happen now just like healthcare can't be so so my frustration is sorry that that's why I wanted to get to this question first is that those of us who fight for defined benefit plans all the time we believe that that is better even though there is an issue about portability but what this does is for the people who don't have anything in retirement this creates a way including for people who actually are being in you know going from job to job and and needing the portability and so that's why and then the second piece is this on the guarantee and sir I haven't read your book but I spent a lot of time in terms of pension trust and pension trustee meetings Mary is one of our trustees if you hook this to the kind of robust pension plans which have pooled assets and have had and have are governed by trustees and have the full faith and credit of the United States government we can create that kind of guarantee as we do in other types of ways sorry thanks very much and she's not passionate by the way good guys on the guarantee point I just want to we're not guaranteeing a return all we're saying is what you're you you are guaranteed to get out at least what you put in and we can take anyone through the math of that but but trust us that we've had this crawled over by a number of highly reputable economists and and and statisticians and and it works and it's essentially costless we it's it's costless because it's not really ordinarily very necessary so you might say well why bother then I think the psychological benefit of telling people that you're guaranteed to get out at least what you put in with a high probability of getting a lot more is very powerful myself yeah and there are examples of employer defined benefit plans where the employer has gone bust and they haven't so there is is there are examples of loss which I think reinforces your psychological point it doesn't you touch on something else there and so when employer goes bust as you know the the government steps in and gives a often a not quite is it attractive but does guarantee that the the the pension the the pension plan will there will be a pension plan I don't know why we don't do that for public sector pension plans too I just way out of my depth there but another way to think about it so I want to go to a dug to pick up on one of the other questions which was about what about people that aren't currently working and you can sorry yeah one of the questioners was about women who may take time out from work or older people who may have left the workforce or voluntary or not what about them those are great questions and I mean our plan is supposed to be forward-looking and where we want to be 10 years from now 20 years from now I think Tony's mentioned this in his book and we're up front in that for somebody who is in their 60s implementing this plan now is not going to save them in three to five years we're looking to see where we're going to be in a generation and the big thing for our plan and other plans is the portability everyone's going to have gaps in their work women more than most and people who have disabilities you're going to have months and years where you leave an employer and don't earn income but if the majority of the time you are earning and saving and you have the employer contribution and it's compounding over time and you are not withdrawing the money from the plan that's the key element our plan has a savings component and a retirement component I won't talk all about it you can read about it more in the text but if people are able to withdraw for savings emergencies but they keep the money in the retirement plan and it compounds over decades then they're going to be in so much better shape when they retire and I'd like to just quickly touch on one thing that's related to this is one of the reasons we're interested in this is because we hear so much about income inequality in this country but we have an even bigger problem with wealth inequality and it cuts sharply across demographic lines I was shocked to learn that the average white household has 146 thousand dollars excuse me the median white household has 146 thousand dollars in wealth savings retirement etc and the median black and latino household has 14,000 that's a factor of 10 to 1 and one of the biggest drivers of that wealth inequality is the disparity in retirement savings and all of these plans would do a great deal to address that thanks very much let me comment a couple things several comments whether she solved this problem to you at the end so I just want to go if you don't mind you'll hold on to your thought I know I also want to ask you about corporate governance so Chad just last comments from you well I want to jump in on on caregiving first of all and to go back for a moment to what something my boss talks about all the time which is the dignity of work we think of that as as sort of it's the way we govern but it also means more than you might think at first blush I mean we think if you are caring for a child caring for an aging parent to jump in on caregiving that is work and it should it should have dignity in the same way as a traditional wage earning job and it's why we've supported legislation that would create a caregivers credit so that for social security purposes you've got credit for caregiving as if you had earned a wage at a job and I know there was a question about affordable housing which I really appreciated too because this is all wrapped in one big picture about Americans financial security and Americans the wealth they're trying to grow and to I guess be the token millennial on the panel I'll also raise student loans has a little bit to do with the inability of folks to save and it's why it's why the senator has both fought hard to make for student debt relief on the back end but also to make college more affordable on the front end and on housing affordability also a serious serious problem we are working on legislation that hopefully will roll out this summer to provide some kind of renters credit to make housing more affordable to renters we know the tax code works very hard for homeowners and to make homes they already have affordable but does very little for renters and so we're working on legislation on that front as well because it's all part of one big picture great thanks very much I think Doug you must be generation z or y or x or something right okay Tony you wanted to jump in on I'm sure many of these questions excuse me and including on the question of how that Doug was talking about how to what the details of the plans will be I also wanted to ask you maybe before that and before you round off just to address quickly the question on corporate governance and if these pensions because you're you know about the whole issue I think that's easy you're just moving more savings and therefore more investments and therefore more equities into the hands of fiduci people with fiduciary obligations to broad numbers of working people I think it improves governance thanks very much I did want to come back on Doug's point our plan which gives we call it fair because everyone gets the same $600 credit so you no longer have the system that we have now where the higher the earner the more of the tax break you get so it's it doesn't address all of the income inequalities across ethnic and gender lines obviously but it certainly is a way better step than where we are and one of the things we try to do is not be too idealistic frankly but come up with something that actually works where we can get support from both sides of the aisle and I'm sure many of the people in this room lean to the democratic side perhaps all but but from from from the from the other side from the other side of the aisle our plan does a few things first of all it works and this is the dominant worry of of American voters and and eventually all part both parties will listen secondly it it requires no new taxes no increase in deficit no new government bureaucracy it's your money in your account you control it you see it it doesn't go in the maw the government somewhere and it rewards work and savings so those are a lot of touchstones that appeal to the other side of the aisle so so we've had a lot of discussions with with representatives of both parties and we get a sympathetic ear from both parties thank you very much indeed now I'm sorry but we're out of time and I had indicated that we were going to that I was just going to take those people you I'm sure during the lunch you can approach people for for questions and I'm appealing to Kathleen that's right yeah I need to wrap up so Teresa is going to um is going to close but before she's walking up here I would like to give this terrific panel around the applause and thanks thank you I want to point out that Elise Eshelman got us all here from EPI you're a success you're going to go far thank you Elise I'm also here for three minutes to consolidate what we've learned and also to figure out where we go from here first of all I also want to thank all of you for coming it is a testament to how much of a problem this is in America it used to be slow moving and now it's on top of us and the main issue is that we have given up on the idea that everyone who has worked for a lifetime of work deserves the dignity to choose to retire and to live without worry for the rest of their lives and so if the word we've heard today that needs to be lifted up and taken out of this room is dignity that's why we're here we have learned that in order to provide that dignity we need to finance the period of time in which we can choose to retire and that financing model depends upon a pyramid on the bottom of that pyramid is social insurance or pay as you go social security system and this all fails unless we shore up that system give it up to expand social security and to provide more revenue to that system that's key but it's not a failed system it's not broken down it's the only part of our system that is actually worked what has broken is that other layer of retirement security which is that employer provided voluntary system that has completely crumbled and what we've talked about here is to provide a fully funded retirement system for all Americans 55 million Americans have been left out and they're going to be continued to be left out if we continue with this design very unique to the United States that we can individually direct our investments and voluntarily save if we only had financial literacy forget that of course we want fourth graders to know about balancing their checkbooks but instead of trying to change the people we have we need to design a system for the people we have so we need a universal system everybody is covered we need a tax system we're 160 billion dollars now that goes into so-called retirement savings actually goes to all Americans regardless of how much we have we need to change the deduction into refundable tax credit we need a system that invests that hard earned savings in a way that makes sense professionally invested will get the lowest fees and the highest returns and we could only do that in a defined benefit type system so forget about this individual directed commercial accounts they don't work we need a system that provides lifetime income we have research that shows that if someone has the equivalent defined benefit and equivalent defined contribution the person who has to manage their money to last for the rest of their lives has increased levels of depression can probably die earlier when they're stress related this is not a system that we need to have and the only entity that can provide lifetime long-term guaranteed retirement is the federal government so kudos to the states that are trying to get their people into a defined into a savings account and we know in the united states that social policy does not happen at the federal government immediately it starts with the states one year before social security was passed 23 states were on their way to have an affordable mandatory universal pension plan so we know that we're on the road and we know we're on the road to a solution because you're all here you are all here because you advise people what to do about their own lives and your advice is vote for people who will support social security and a solution to this failed employer system you're all here because maybe some of you advise people who are thought leaders who are powerful senators house of representatives or even presidential candidates they need to know what we have found out that voters will put retirement security at the top of their list perhaps a stand in for not having a wage increase perhaps a stand in to know that when they get older they can't work either because their employers will involuntarily retire them or they can't have the capabilities to work until they're 70 or 75 we all know that people want to prevent raising the retirement age because that's just a cut in in benefits even though on the hill that might seem like a solution you are all here because you want to provide dignity to retirement and dignity for work and so I want to end closed thank you for being here and now we eat lunch and talk to each other thank you very much