Levels, 40 of the people who save in open accounts dont go through the paperwork to get the savers credit. And as gary said, we dont put that credit into the account. So i think if the states look and say were going to create these accounts, one of the ways to grow these accounts faster is to put the match in the accounts and then the other piece to make it simpler is lets make that match stick. You know, i think there would be a lot of agreement of saying at least the match that you get cant come out until youre retired. Weve heard earlier my son plight not go into this if he know he can get that money out until hes 65, well, maybe let him take his money, but not let him take out the money that goes in from the tax code. So, i think theres some things that we could definitely do to make it better. I think we all have a lot more ideas. I was thinking earlier, everybody commented i would Say Something about what they have to say, well have a great discussion. Lets get on it. Were just at the very beginning. Exactly. Plenty of time left. So i want to get each of you a chance to also weigh in on additional policy steps that should be on the table. Weve heard about the savers credit, weve heard abou the auto i. R. A. S. A general sense, a report out makes this point, tax code is lopsided, theres a lot more that benefits higher income households than those at the bottom, refundability is key there. What additional policy steps have we not been talking about that also need on the table at federal or state level . Ill start. I know im going to sound like a broken record a little bit here. I apologize. Because i want to pick out what diane said. I really the reason why i am a big supporter of expanding the savers credit is because i think its doable and can get bipartisan support. One of the keys for the savers credit, its not making it refundable, but having it go into the account, dont parse me with words. Dont debate the language for a second. Having it go into the account is ultimately our goal because what we want to do is build assets, right . And i think that will make it simpler than will compliment. One of the things i said my initial comment, we should complement the features and the policies that we know work and are effective. Providing more access to payroll deductions savings plan we know is an effective feature. Doing it through auto enrollment we know is effective. The states are taking up where the federal government sort of fell off, as shawn mentioned in terms of the auto i. R. A. At the federal level, at the very least, we can have a savers credit. I think its important to emphasize this is, i think, something thats achievable in tax reform and meets a lot of our goals. Yeah. I would add, i think it depends on the problem we are trying to solve more specifically, right. Are we trying to improve adequacy for current savers in some way . That leads you down a certain path. Are we trying to bring into the Retirement Savings system those that have been left behind or not engaged . That takes you down a different kind of road because you start to think about, who are we talking about . Right . Talking potentially lowwage workers, those who dont automatically save in any other way that may be disconnected from the banking system, moving from job to job. That means a different set of things that you want to look at and you want to see how the tax system is influencing or affecting particular workers and families. So ill say a couple of things on that. It was great im going to plug a cap study recently, earlier this year. Well let you do that any time you want. Yes, right. Where they looked at demographics, right . The big picture there was weve got three states majority minority now. Thats going up to 14 in the next few decades, right, whats happening to minority workers, how are they saving . Its an Important National question but really important in a few states, right . Look at whats happening, for example, in california, were looking at Retirement Savings issue, you know, 3 million latino workers dont have access, right, to Retirement Savings in california. Weve got to be able to dive into that, unravel that, figure out whats going on with those particular workers if were able to substantially increase overall savings over time. The other issue that i think is really important related to this is, you know, a lot of the data thats coming out looking at wealthy inequality and whats happening amongst households, based on Race Ethnicity is finding, even if you control for income, even if you control for employment status, you find real disparities in savings and wealth between africanamericans, latinos and whites in upper 20s, good College Degrees but they have student loan debt, right . They have significant amounts of debt preventing them from being able to engage in regular savings behavior. So even if you have strong incentives, even if you have good access, youre going to run into problems if were not also addressing some of these problems, and tax reform can look at whats happening for certain populations and segments and try to provide some relief and i thik ultimately the right kinds of incentives. I agree, you look at this is the issue with the savers tax credit i mentioned, we can get changes to credit in a major tax reform overhaul but at what cost. Ultimately, thats going to include a lot of other provisions in a tax reform package that could skew to the upper half of the income or upper 1 , and youve got to wonder, are we really addressing the problem if thats the result were getting, right . I mentioned weve got savers but also a refundable Child Tax Credit in 2001. But i and other civil rights organizations oppose that bill, for justifiable reasons. We have to think about this more holistically. But i think, on the whole, it depends on the problem were trying to solve. I fundamentally think its about works who are not in the system, not saving, orwho have different kinds of situations that we should be looking at as a longterm investment in improving Retirement Savings. And building off of that, and i want to bring you on in this, shawn, given the political restraints weve been talking about this morning that frames so much of what happens in washington, are we in a place where if we want to see those kinds of improvements and we want bipartisan support, where were going to have to find a way to pay for those improvements . Shawn, do you have thoughts on that . First, i want build on something that eric was making. Sure, go for it. Actually, a good conversation we had at larosa earlier in the week talking about this is. A lot of the folks were talking about uncovered also dont have Emergency Savings. And certainly relates to some of their earlier discussion about leakage from Retirement Plans. How we think about that . I think right now, in the most proposals out there, theres no way to really grapple with that, other than to concede that okay, some people going to have to access this money, so lets put them into a roth i. R. A. So they can take out their contributions and not pay a penalty. And i think this is an area where more work needs to be done and think of it as a way to pair the need for shortterm savings with some kind of features in the plan design to help people in that respect. So, i think its an important area that we need to think about, because otherwise, we are going to have the leakage problem for people who go in or plenty of people who arent going in because they feel like they cant access the money easily enough and they may need it. You know, i think on this question of paying for the reform, i think, i noted earlier, my biggest concern is that the Retirement Savings system is going to be asked to pay for other things, who were going to take money away from it. And you know, thats certainly something that i would caution against. Finally, lets have a discussion about how do we use this money more effectively . But i think it would be a bad idea to talk about taking money away for deficit reduction or to pay for eliminating reducing Capital Gains taxes. So you know, i think thats that would be my biggest concern, i think. You know, if youre talking about a lot of people talk about tax reform as something might do that revenue neutral. Also a lot of proposals that frankly would blow open giant holes in the budget because they dont replace the revenue. But even in the context of where its being paid for as a whole, i use former ways and mean chairman camps proposal as an example again, where he supposedly revenueneutral on the whole, but it did take money away from Retirement Savings. Diane, you wanted to comment . And again, look back at that 2001 tax bill. The savers credit was scored by gary and some of the folks in joint tax at about 10 billion of lost revenue. The score for the rate revisions and the reductions and the bracket changes, i think, was probably about 800, almost 900 billion. When you look at the scale, you know, i think one of the hardest things we have if you look at how much if you were to i think the original, one score, one of the obama budgets about making the savers credit refundable and linking that with auto i. R. A. , you put that together, youre probably somewhere maybe 50 billion that that was back in 2011, so its probably more than that. Looking at 50 billion. Some of it depends on what youre doing. It sounds like a lot, but if your going to turn around and do major rate reduction and major restructuring of corporate taxation, how do we not do something for half of the americans who right now feel theyre in a crisis, you know . Theres been some analysis if you look at the top fortune plans, which has been done by a group, they have publication. They said even among career employees at these large corporations where many of them still have even defined benefit plans as part of their retirement portfolio, one out of five, only one out of five, are going to be able to maintain their standard of living. What they also suggested, even if their circumstances, 19 or 18 of individuals really wont be able to retire until their 75. Thats in the best plans. Those arent for the latino, africanamerican population where majority of people have nothing saved. When we look at populations at risk, they are minorities, they are women, they are single individuals, and they are our children. And we have to do something for their future. Diane, you mentioned dollar figures that might sound large as raw figures. But you and i were talking about the piece that no one thinks about the cost of doing nothing here. Could you talk a little bit about that . The reality is i dont think weve put anything on the cost of doing nothing yet. Its a figure we havent looked at. We know, for example, from our data, that when retirees spend their defined benefit pension money, they generate a trillion dollars of Economic Activity in the United States roughly in one year. What concerns me is when we have generations coming up that will have half the amount of resources that our current retirees do and we have baby boomers who no longer will be able to spend and help fuel the economy as they have done throughout their entire, you know, time in the workforce, what happen does that mean . And at the same time, we also know we have millennials coming out and theyre being challenged to buy houses, save for retirement, to pay off student loans. Whats going to happen to our economy if people dont we have a consumer economy. When we dont spend, what happens . And we asked individuals in our Public Opinion survey, what will you do to respond to the crisis that you tell us youre in . 75 of the people say, im going to spend less money in retirement. If im a drug company or a health care company, i want to be a concern about whos going to be my marketplace in the future. Its not just what are we going to spend more people who need the help to stay above the safety net and the safety net cost can be up to 2,500 a person per year. This is from an estimate, a study done by aarp in utah, for people who need that type of direct assistance, that can be a huge cost. Just to follow on diane, i think understanding that if individuals dont have assets for retirement, it could create greater burdens for big, local governments. Aarp sponsored work done by Oxford Economics because we wanted to look to see if we could increase savings, what would that mean for longterm growth . And its substantial. Increasing savings is a way for us to improve our economy. And i think thats on the left and right with both the desirable outcome. So savings can be part of that solution. And we have evidence to support that. So shaun, some people say that the looming Retirement Crisis is the result of poor choices or personal ineptitude. Amd i think its important to talk a little bit about messaging, right, because on this panel, we might all be preaching to the choir, but when were thinking about Building Public will, political will, what do you say to people who claim, oh, people just should have saved more, right . Its on them if they dont have savings and theyre not prepared for retirement . Clearly, if you look at the experience of the vast majority of working people in the last couple of decades in which you had, you know, at best, stagnant wages, you have more recently, Surging Health care costs, which by the way, are probably going to cannibalize Retirement Savings for many people Going Forward if we dont address outofpocket costs. You know, its clear that we have, you know, an economy thats out of balance, that has had enormously destructive effect on individuals and families, Financial Security. So that is the context. And i think its, you know, indisputable that particularly for middle and lowincome americans, thats been unfortunately the trajectory that weve been on for far too long. You know, i think also that, weve talked about some of it here today, theres sort of these enormous differences in peoples experience based on whether or not they have the benefit of a workplace Retirement Plan. I think it was lily from the first panel pointing out how few actually saved directly into an i. R. A. , where you have the Tax Advantages there, you compare a similarly situated person who has workplace plan to one who doesnt have a workplace plan, right . And the odds of them saving for retirement tremendously different. So really underlines how we have a system that doesnt necessarily work that well for people and there are real problems with the Retirement Savings system. Look at the reality of that, its very clear, this isnt about moral virtuousness, its about the larger economic storm that people are facing and a system that doesnt work well for them. Diane, you wanted to comment . I think its really important for us to get some real pictures of where the typical american is. So many of us in the policy sphere you, know, some people are lawyers, some people were economists, some people are different things, but were not the average family or the the average family, for example, in california, thats not covered by a pension, the average income is 25,000. And so, you know, a lot of individuals dont understand that. If they can even save 500 a year, thats huge. Thats a huge thing for them. First of all to understand that thats important. The other piece is to understand really where the assets go. And i used to work for a congressman from north dakota on the ways and means committee. I, as a staff person, gave him a statistic one night that he couldnt believe and it was from the Government Accountability office. They had looked at the assets of baby boomers. They looked at all of the Financial Assets of baby boomers, and their assessment was that you know, the bottom half of baby boomers owned just 3 of the baby boomers Financial Assets. And that was startling to him. He couldnt believe that. Of course, the top 5 of the baby boomers owned 58 of the baby boomers assets. This was before the financial crisis. We looked at this a couple of years ago, after the crisis came about, and as it was into recovery, that ratio was about the same, in fact a little bit more concentrated at the top, but the bottom half still only had 3 of the baby boomers Financial Assets. And we took it a step deeper and looked at look at those assets dedicated for retirement and retirement accounts. We have a lot of stuff in the tax code to make sure those plans dont discriminate. Well, we got the bottom half of the baby boomers Retirement Assets to be 4 of all of the Retirement Assets. The very, very top dont get as much, but a little bit more goes to the top 20 . In reality, theres a real big myth out there that, you know, people are supposed to have something besides Social Security. But look at the income that goes to people who are actually retired and no longer working. The seniors over 60, you know, the bottom half, almost all of their income is coming from Social Security, and that is something, if we really want to change, we have to start getting real convincing data points that will never leave the minds of policymakers. Earlier this week, we had reports let me see if i can get this right, the top 100 ceos have savings equal to the bottom 41 of American Families. Just to highlight the staggering statistics as well. Eric . This is a common issue. What we tend to get on our side is, they cant speak english, foreignborn, lower education, levels of course they cant save for retirement. A lot of it does boil down to looking at the outcome of savings, wealth levels, income levels and putting the focus on individuals and in this case, its about increasing access, opportunity, increasing incentives to save for those that are mobile or moving in relatively low income. But its an important distinction