Nevin's Data "Points"

   It’s been said that politics makes strange bedfellows — but it doesn’t get much stranger than President Trump and Teresa Ghilarducci. At least temporarily, they appear aligned on one of retirement policy’s most persistent challenges: how to reach workers who don’t have access to a retirement plan at work. President Trump’s April 30 executive order directs Treasury to develop a federal IRA savings framework aimed at uncovered workers — contract workers, part-timers, the self-employed, and employees of small businesses. And while the proposal is still light on details, it has drawn enthusiastic support from one of the nation’s most consistent critics of the employer-based retirement system: Professor Teresa Ghilarducci. The Trump initiative — hinted at in the State of the Union address — would synchronize with the expanded Saver’s Match included in the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022. The Saver’s Match is one of the more consequential — if still underappreciated — changes in that leg...

If you have turned on a TV, walked by a radio, driven down a residential street, or answered a phone (or more likely let it go unanswered) in the past month, you will, of course, be aware that our nation will officially go to the polls today.  Of course, our nation has been “going” to the polls—or at least casting votes—for several weeks now. And while some states (and voters) have done so in elections past, a combination of factors (not the least, concerns about the current pandemic) means that the process of voting, like so much of our lives this year, is going to be “unprecedented,” both in terms of the breadth and volume of votes cast prior to election “day”—and perhaps on that day itself. And yes, it’s been a particularly nasty—one feels compelled to say “unprecedented”—election cycle.  In that regard, I recently came across this:  “Certainly, politics has never been a pretty business, but I doubt that I would get much argument in stating that this p...

Over the coming weeks, a question that you’re likely to see posed (again and again) about the President’s Executive Order is – “will it work?” “Work” in this case means to expand access to workplace retirement plans, for that is the stated policy of the Trump administration in issuing the order . The answer, of course, will depend in no small part on what emerges as a result. While it’s hard to argue with the underlying principle, and even less with the foundational arguments (“Enhancing workplace retirement plan coverage is critical to ensuring that American workers will be financially prepared to retire” and “Regulatory burdens and complexity can be costly and discourage employers, especially small businesses, from offering workplace retirement plans to their employees”), at this point the order is no more than a directive to the Labor and Treasury Departments to consider and recommend some alternatives. That said, the directives  are reasonably specific – t...