Rich Lowry wrote this morning about Sanders’s wrongheaded proposal to legislate a 32-hour workweek, complementing NR’s editorial from Monday. Over at the Hill, Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute wrote today about a different aspect of Sanders’s wrongness: “Sanders’s statements about retirement savings in the U.S., buttressed by a recent report released by his committee staff, are so inaccurate as to be irresponsible.”
Biggs goes through a few of them:
- Sanders claims that 45 percent of people between 55 and 64 years old have no retirement savings. But he equates “retirement savings” with IRAs or 401(k) accounts, ignoring every other potential source of retirement income (such as other financial products, pensions, real estate, small businesses, etc.). A more reliable survey of household finances from the Federal Reserve found that 90 percent of Americans aged 55 to 64 have some form of retirement savings, Biggs writes, twice as large a proportion as Sanders claims.
- Sanders claims Americans have “no idea how they will be able to retire with any shred of dignity or respect.” According to the same Fed survey, Biggs writes, among senior households in 2022, “82 percent said they were ‘doing okay’ or ‘living comfortably,’ up from 62 percent when the survey began in 2013.”
- Sanders claims that 23 percent of American seniors live in poverty. “That would be news to the U.S. Census Bureau, which in a 2023 analysis using IRS data found just 6.4 percent of U.S. seniors with income below the federal poverty threshold,” Biggs writes. “Our median senior’s income is 50 percent higher than Denmark, 29 percent above Germany and double that of Japan.”
Read Biggs’s whole piece here.