November 30, 2025 • 31 mins
Newt talks with Andrew Biggs, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, about the perceived retirement crisis in the United States, arguing that the U.S. retirement system is performing well compared to other developed countries. He highlights that the typical U.S. senior is among the wealthiest globally. Biggs, who has worked on Social Security reform for over 20 years, notes that while surveys indicate a widespread belief in a retirement crisis, actual retirees report financial stability, with only 4% describing their situation as a crisis. Biggs advocates for a reevaluation of Social Security, proposing a shift from focusing solely on solvency to considering structural reforms that better align with current economic realities. He warns that without reform, the Social Security Trust Fund is projected to run out by 2032, necessitating either significant tax increases or benefit cuts. He suggests that a special commission could facilitate necessary reforms, as the regular political process may be inadequate to address the issue effectively.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of New World, Americans and the elected
officials who represent them are worried about retirement. Many fear
a retirement crisis of inadequate savings and incomes as the
US population ages in the real retirement crisis. While almost
everything you know about the US retirement system is wrong,
(00:27):
Andrew Biggs provides economic insights and hard data to explain
to America's retirement savings situation. He argues the US retirement
system compares well to those of other developed countries. In fact,
the typical US senior is among the richest in the world.
The retirement savings gap is overwhelmingly due to government's not
(00:49):
funding benefits they promised. I'm really pleased to welcome my guests,
Andrew Biggs. He is a Senior Fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute, where he studies social security reform, state and
local government pensions, and public sector pay and benefits. Before
joining AI, he was the Principal Deputy Commissioner of the
(01:13):
Social Security Administration, where he oversaw the Social Security Administration's
policy research efforts. Andrew, welcome, and thank you for joining
(01:35):
me on Newtsworld.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Oh, thank you very much for having me. Happy to
be here.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
What drew you into what I guess now is over
twenty years of work on social security? What attracted you
to taking this on.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I was out of grad school, I was working in Washington,
d C. And I started thinking about going back to
kind of more research or hinted areas. I remember at
the time people were saying, well, do you want to
work on taxes or do you want to work on
social security? And it just struck me. Soci security it
was some more interesting in the two issues. It lets
you be a generalist, I mean, just speaking as a researcher.
(02:08):
It lets you be a generalist while actually having a
chosen profession. Social scurity is so large. It covers every
area of government, every part of people's lives, and so
it just gives you an opportunity to look at a
whole variety of different areas. And twenty five years later,
believe it or not, I'm still working on it. It's
just been a fascinating issue to work on throughout my career.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
When you work on something for a quarter century, I'm curious,
how have your views changed during that period.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
That's a very good question, I'd say, in two ways.
On social scarity, specifically, when I came into the issue,
I was working at the Cato Institute, a very libertarian
think tank, and that was the time when the sort
of social security privatization movement was very active, and I
was active in that, and I think that was a
very interesting time and it sort of had to play
(02:59):
out at the same time. When I look back at it,
I think I worked on the Jorge W. Bush reforms
in two thousand and five. I think it might have
been better if we had tried to cut a deal
then rather than wait, since every day ten thousand baby
boomers shift from becoming workers paying into the system who
care about taxes, to beneficiaries collecting from it, who care
(03:22):
much more about benefits. But over that time I also
learned a lot more about how well the US retirement
systems work. If you'd asked me twenty years ago, are
Americans saving enough for retirement? I would have said no,
because that's what you read the newspaper all the time.
Later on, I started getting much more deeply into that issue,
and you discovered, you know, Americans and the US retirement
system are really doing very well. That plays into how
(03:45):
you think about social security reform. If Americans weren't saving
for retirement on their own, then any cuts to so
security I think will be hard to justify. But when
Americans retirement savings are at record levels and poverty and
old age is at record low, you could start thinking
about things a little bit differently.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Given what may be the objective fact. There was a
survey done in twenty twenty three where eighty nine percent
of the American people agreed that there is a retirement
savings crisis.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
The survey data on the so called retirement crisis are
very interesting. Almost every survey you conduct. If you ask
Americans is there a retirement crisis, they will say yes,
and the one you cited is the evidence of that.
At the same time, if you ask retirees themselves if
they would describe their own financial situations, is a crisis,
(04:40):
as a survey by Vanguard did several years ago, only
four percent of seniors say yes. Similarly, when the Federal
Reserve asks seniors, are you finding it difficult to get
by again, it was only about four percent. And today's
workers are saving much more for retirement than people did
in the past. That's not equivocal and the data so
(05:01):
it is really a perception. I had a chapter, you know,
a retirement crisis for thee but not for me. There's
a huge split in how Americans view the whole retirement
system versus how they view their own retirement savings.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Why then, do you have this split between a general
sense that it's a huge problem, we probably can't fix it,
or the political cost of fixing it will be huge,
versus the individual who's saying, well, you know, I'm actually
pretty well off.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Well, there's a substantive reason why people worry about retirement.
If you're a thirty five year old saying, Okay, I'm
really kind of getting started now saving for retirement, what
do I have to think about? Because I want to
be able to maintain my pre retirement standard living once
I retire. You have to know, okay, what kind of
standard of living are I going to have in my fifties.
That's hard to predict. You have to know the rate
(05:55):
of return on the investments you're going to make. That's
hard to predict. You want to know how long you're
going to live, and that's hard to predict. So you
have a lot of things that are really very difficult.
So it's understandable that people are worried about it when
on top of that, you have I don't want to
call it a conspiracy, but what I'll say is nobody
has the incentive to tell Americans the truth, which is
(06:16):
that our retirement system is working pretty well. You know,
if you're in the financial industry, you know, what is
the chance that they are going to tell you you're
saving too much for retirement. They have a product to
sell and they want to keep you buying it. Likewise,
the media, are you going to click on an article
titled you know, retirement crisis coming? Or are you click?
Americans doing okay? So they have an incentive. You know,
(06:39):
they say if it leads, it leads, So they have
an incentive to gend things up. And finally, in a
political realm, there are people whose philosophical views and I'll
call it philosophical views because they're not really based in evidence,
but they just really doubt that people buy themselves can
make these sorts of decisions. They don't trust private industry,
and they would like to see it expanded role for government,
(07:01):
make social security bigger, and so forth. So once again,
they're not going to tell you the good news. I
have no incentive either way, This is purely an academic interest.
For me, it really is surprising that people who know
better will still use the scare language to try to
motivate people.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
In an article you wrote called We're going about Social
Security Reform the wrong Way, you make a strong case
that the very language, the very way we talk about
it makes it hard for us to really work our
way through what we need to be doing. Could you
expand on that.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Well, when you think about, say social security policy, think
about almost any other thing the government does, many other
policy issues. What you want to say is how do
we make this government policy or government program work better
at lower costs. So you're thinking about how the program works.
With social security policy, you're thinking almost entirely about the
(07:58):
solvency of the Social Security prom And people are choosing
from a list of items. We can raise the retirement age,
we can reduce costs to living adjustments, we can increase
the payroll tax, we can reduce benefits. And they're piecing
these pieces of a puzzle together in such a way
that they hope they get to seventy five here actual
heal balance or whatever measure they're trying to get to.
(08:21):
And I argue that's just the wrong way to think
about it. It's unproductive because it assumes that the social
security program is working perfectly, with the one exception that
it is out of financial balance. But what are the
chances that a program that was devised in nineteen thirty five,
when literally fifty percent of seniors we're living in poverty
(08:42):
is the right structure for a program for twenty thirty
five and beyond when not fifty percent of seniors are
in poverty but six and a half percent, when we
have four to one case, we have the Internet, we
have all these innovations. If you were inventing social security today,
you would think about it much differently. So, coming out
of the failure of the attempted Bush Social Secure reforms
(09:05):
in two thousand and five, I really thought it was
worthwhile to go at SOI Secure reform from a blank
slate approach and say, what would be the kind of
program we would devise for somebody who's entering the workforce today,
who might retire forty years later. What would that program
look like? And so what we should think about that is, Okay,
how do we get from here to there? Not how
(09:26):
do we patch together this system which is underfunded by
twenty six trillion dollars. Now, obviously we have to fix
the solvency issue, but thinking more broadly about the Social
Security program, what we need for what it does, opens
up opportunities. Just as an example, a high income couple
retiring today can receive almost one hundred thousand dollars in
(09:48):
Social security benefits. That's two to three times higher than
what they would receive if they were in Canada or
the UK, or Australia or New Zealand. Nobody would invent
a pro today that pays one hundred thousand dollars a
year at high income retire is they can just save
more on their own. But by the creep of the program,
where it's all on an autopilot, we're not thinking about it.
(10:10):
That's where we got So what we should be thinking
about is not simply what do we have to do
to people's benefits to make the system solving? But should
we be paying that kind of money to people who
clearly don't need it. It doesn't mean slashing that of
it's today. It just means looking over the long term,
do we want to refocus this program in a different way.
So it's thinking beyond this solvency box and just treating
(10:32):
social security as any other program. We want it to work,
we don't want to have it with excessive costs.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Wouldn't anything like that lead to almost automatic attack by
AARP unquestionable.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
One thing I remember back from the two thousand and
five experience in the Bush White House, I remember talking
to somebody about the legislative strategy for Social Security Reform,
which at the time I was very much a numbers
crime so I was not in charge of that, but
at the time AARP was the eight hundred pound gorilla.
And what I suggested to them is you either have
(11:08):
to beat AARP, debate them and defeat them, or you
have to figure out what kind of deal you have
to make with them in order to get something to pass.
And the Bush strategy just did neither of those things.
I think that was part of the failure. You just
had to decide what you were going to do. In
literally anything you do on this you are going to
be open to attack. You know, even if you cut
(11:29):
benefits by a penny for the highest income retire ARP
is going to say something. You know, they are the
union for old people. You just have to be open
to that. The only way you can avoid criticism by
ARP and groups twitched to us are well to the
left of ARP and social security would be simply to
surrender to them. So I think the key component for
(11:52):
me in the book is that when we think about
social security, we need to speak to Americans in English,
not in sort of actual al numbers. It's very tempting
to just jump into how the social security benefit formula
works and things like that. We just have to think
conceptually about what we want to do. And you know,
it's very easy to say we should have some minimum
(12:13):
benefit to keep retirees out of poverty. You know, we're
a rich country. There's not very many poor retirees. That's
something we can do to give people confidence to make
the sacrifices that are involved with reform social scurity, say
doesn't have a minimum benefit. On the other hand, it
doesn't really make sense to be paying on hundred thousand
dollars a year to two high income retirees. You know,
(12:33):
nobody else does that. There's no policy purpose for it.
That's speaking in English. Often discussions about social security are
just in this actuarial mumbo jumbo of the Bend points
to the benefit formulas or the CPI W versus chain CPI,
things that just don't make any sense to people. It
doesn't mean we lie to people. It means you convert
(12:54):
it to English to terms they can understand, and I
think that makes for a more compelling argument.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Let's say we do nothing. At what point is there
a crisis?
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Well, right now, the Social Care Trust Fund is projected
to run out in the year twenty thirty two. In
last year, Social Caurity Trustees report they predicted it would
last until twenty thirty four. But Congress actually passed two
bills this past year which made the insolvency happen sooner,
which is the opposite of what we'd want. But in
twenty thirty two, when the trust fund runs out, Social
(13:43):
Carey is still collecting a lot of money, over trillion
dollars a year in taxes. So the trust fund running
out does not mean your benefits are zero it out,
but under law it means the program could only pay
out benefits equal to what it collects in taxes. That
would mean that benefits to drop by around twenty four percent. Now,
it doesn't mean necessarily you'd have to have an across
(14:05):
the board benefit cut of twenty four percent. A lot
of people think that, and that would throw millions of
seniors into poverty. I think the president or the administration
of the time would have some discretion, but the default
position in when the trust fund runs out is you
cut benefits. Now, I don't think that's going to happen,
but to avoid cutting benefits, if Congress says we just
(14:27):
want to keep paying full benefits for everybody, and we're
to raise taxes to do it, that would be the
largest peacetime tax increase in US history, about one and
a half percent of GDP. Alternately, you know, nobody likes
to raise taxes, so ultimately they could just borrow the money.
But when we think about the size of the debt,
and when you think of the dynamics of financial markets,
(14:51):
you can borrow until financial markets lose confidence in your
ability to repay. It could be any sort of trigger
event which causes that loss of confidence. Personally, think the
federal government announcing as policy that our strategy for funding
our biggest programs to borrow money we can't possibly repay
might be the trigger. So we face a number of
(15:13):
very unpleasant choices, and the habit, the pattern for most
of the past forty years has been simply to cover
our ears, cover our eyes, and kick the can down
for the next congress. But we're running out of time
to do that.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
The nature of polemics is to avoid anything painful for
as long as possible. So I'm hearing you say that
probably not in twenty eight, but certainly by thirty two,
the presidential campaign may well be centered around this question.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
I think so young. Even for now, President Trump will
be out of office before this insolvency happens. So again,
the incentives are just not to focus on it. But
you're having the senators who will be elected this year
who will be in off us in twenty thirty two
because they have sixty year terms. So it is starting
to become a more salient issue. And the question, though,
(16:08):
is how our political process handles this. The difficulty we
face on sol scary form or any large issue is
a number of hurdles you have to come over to
make anything pass into law. You have to get it
through the House, which means the majority. Then you have
to get sixty votes in the Senate. Then you have
to hope the President signs it, and then most likely
(16:28):
somehow it ends up in the Supreme Court, it's just
a very high hurdle to overcome. In other countries with
parliamentary systems, you know, it's a simple majority, and they've
been able to reform their systems much better than we have.
With the exception of France, most countries have reformed their pensions,
you know, in the past couple of decades. So we
really face a challenge.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Are there particularly successful structural reforms that you think we
should look at and begin to think about this conversation.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
In the look the real retirement crisis. When I look
at other countries, I try to say, what do other
countries who are like the US do with pensions? You
could look at what is happening in France or Lichtenstein,
but where they're just very different countries from the US.
What I think of countries that are similar, I think
of certain Anglo countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia,
(17:21):
and New Zealand. They're by and large free market, limited
government countries. The interesting thing is our social security program
is very different from theirs. They focus much more of
their resources on preventing poverty in old age and much
less on essentially running a pension system. For upper middle
(17:42):
class people. You know the example I use. You know,
if you have a high income couple today retiring under
Social Security, they could get somewhere on ninety six thousand
dollars per year in benefits. If that same couple were
retiring in Canada, they get less than thirty thousand dollars
a year in benefits. Now, rich Canadians are not starving
in retirement in Canada, they're just saving more on their own.
(18:05):
You know, if you were in the UK, or if
you're in Australia and New Zealand, the benefits are more
generous at the bottom, but they are capped at a
much lower level. And what that means essentially is you know,
people say, well, that turns social Security into a welfare program. Well,
government is good at running welfare programs. Government is terrible
at running pension systems. If you look around the world,
(18:25):
the sort of retirement savings gaps that people reference are
almost entirely a function of governments failing to fund the
benefits that they've promised. They run these programs, we owe
trillion dollars in money, but we put nothing aside for it.
So government is good at running safety nets. And you
know every developed country has a safety net. It's terrible
(18:47):
at saving for the future. So what we should do
is simply expand for one k's and other retirement savings
program To expand retirement savings on top of social security
will refocusing social security more on its role as a
safety program and less as an upper middle class entitlement.
That's how other countries do this, and there's different formulas.
(19:09):
For Australia as a means tested minimum benefit with universal
fore and ks. New Zealand has a universal benefit, everybody
gets it. It's not means tested, and if you want
to save on top of that, it's voluntary. So there's
different flavors of doing it, but the key is simply
focus your resources where they're needed. Government shouldn't do things
(19:31):
that people could would and should do on their own. America,
they're amply able to save for retirement on their own.
Savings have never been higher, so let's focus more on
expanding that and refocus social security on its core mission.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
In the current debate about COVID subsidies for health insurance,
I think we currently subsidize up to nine hundred percent
above poverty.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
At that point, it's not a poverty program.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
The bold proposal is to reduce that to seven percent
above poverty. In some ways, we've become addicted to upper
middle class subsidies by the government, which are in a
sense paid for by the very people who will get
into subsidy.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
You know, you higher taxes on rich people to have
higher Social Security benefits to rich people. It's very inexpensive
to protect low income people via Social Security form. You know,
if you google Social Security form, everything will be about
anti poverty or safety net or things like that. We
could give every senior a social scarity benefit set at
(20:36):
the poverty line, so that literally no one has a
sub poverty level income taking poverty zero. That would cost
about half as much as we're currently paying on the
Social Security program. Although all the language the discussion is
about the safety net, all the money is actually for
middle class, upper middle class people. If you're just a
(20:56):
middle income couple retiring today at the retirement ages now
sixty seven, you would get around fifty eight thousand dollars
in Social Security benefits for a safety debt program. That's
three times the poverty threshold before you've touched a penny
of your own savings, which are at record levels. So
it's one of these things where the rhetoric just doesn't
(21:18):
match the reality of where the money is going.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
How deep do you think, How intense do you think
the pushback would be if you tried to go to
that kind of program?
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Oh, I think it would be intense. Where I think
there is some avenue for progress is this. If you
ask progressives what would you do to fix Social Security?
Almost universally they'll say, we should lift the cap on
earrings subject to the Social Security payroll tax. This year
(21:48):
you're taxed up to one hundred and seventy six thousand dollars.
You earn benefits on that same kind of cap earrings.
Anything above that you neither are tax nor your own benefits.
And so they say, let's eliminate that. There's a variety
of proposals to either do it immediately or phase it out. Now,
that's again the largest peace time tax increase in history, folks,
and a very small number of people. And you say, well,
(22:11):
why would progressives be willing to combine on that? Isn't
this what they want? The issue is that every other
progressive priority depends on that very same money. Probably the
best argument I can think of from a conservative standpoint
or fiscal conservative standpoint of fixing so scare a boy
raising taxes and the rich. At that point, the rich
(22:32):
people are tapped out. You're not going to have green
new deal, you're not going to have Medicare for all,
You're not going to have all these other things that
the progressives want, simply because they've decided to use all
that money to pay higher social security benefits to rich people.
When you talk to progressives, they kind of get this.
It's a standard thing in politics or public policy that
(22:55):
every person work in their area thinks all that extra
money is going to go to their priority. There's somebody
next door at the thing tank it works in some
other issue thinks they're going to get the money. Well,
they're not all going to get the money. There's an
opportunity cost, even for progressives on this. And I've noticed this,
you know, as I've been talking about these issues over
the years, Not just conservatives I talked to, but progressive
(23:16):
policy people are like, yeah, you kind of have a point.
Anything on this would be very very hard politically, and
so it's how do you manage the process. I honestly
don't think what you'd call the regular order can handle this.
I think you need some sort of commission or extrajudicial
process or political process. Just can't do this.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Peter Drucker used to say that if you weren't already
doing something, would you start? And if the is no,
why are you still doing it? If you had a
blank slate today, given how the world has evolved, and
you could design the optimum lifetime retirement program, what would
it look like?
Speaker 2 (24:14):
I think I've do two things. I mean, the only
reason we are going to pay one hundred thousand dollars
in benefits so high in a couple next year is
we're doing that this year. Nobody would invent that from
a scratch. And so in the book, I go through
this thought exercise of you know, if I were inventing
Social Security from a blank slate, what would it look like?
You can't reinvent the program for people retiring today, they've
(24:36):
paid their taxes, they've made their plans. But for somebody's
just entering the workforce today, they haven't paid anything into
the system, they're not owed anything. So for them, we
can do whatever we want. And then you sort of
phase into it. But the idea is you would want
to have a strong minimum benefit so that people are
not going to retire into poverty. I mean, we are
the richest country in the world, with the richest seniors
(24:57):
in the world. It's not too much to ask to
prevent poverty in old age. So you would have some
sort of universal benefit set at the poverty threshold that
just guarantees against that people can go their working lives
knowing with certainty they will not retire into poverty. That's
something government is good at. For retirement income on top
(25:19):
of that, which is not anti poverty, but it's more
sort of income replacement to maintain your pre retirement standard living.
That's where personal savings come in. So I think that
everybody should be offered a retirement plan at work, meaning
you know, four to oh one K or similar. Everybody
should be enrolled in that plan. That This could be
what people call automatic enrollment where you have the chance
(25:40):
to pull out, which is sort of what you have
in the UK or New Zealand, or it could be
mandatory enrollment, which is what you have in Australia. And
there's pros and cons to each. Compared to something like
fixing medicare, this is really a very easy problem to solve.
It's just common sense.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Aren't there a couple of programs ms like in Britain
where at birth you get an initial grant of money
that's in a savings account.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
That's similar to what they're calling now the Trump accounts.
I have mixed feelings in the sense that a lot
of the motivation for that is sort of a numbers game.
They're just saying, well, we borrow the money. Yeah, we
borrowed a five percent. We can invest it seven percent
or whatever and have some sort of arbitrage on it.
And you know, for reasons that economists care about that,
(26:31):
most other people don't. I could explain why that doesn't
make a difference, but you know, I think the issue
we face on that and this was sort of the
motivation for the personal accounts for Social Security sake back
in the Bush ear before. At that point, social Security
was throwing off extra money. We're collecting more in taxes
than we need and benefits, and so the question is
(26:52):
what do you do with that money? Government was spending it,
and the accounts would have helped save it. The idea
of these accounts at birth baby bonds or Trump accounts
is okay, you can get ahead of the game. The
problem you face financially is that does nothing for SOLI
security in the short term, and members of Congress they're
to have to come up with money to find these
(27:13):
accounts for the long term. But then they're still going
to have to come up with money to address the
social security problem that's staring us down in twenty thirty two.
You know, in the short term, it makes the financial
problem harder, and the short term is what most politicians
think about. So I think that is the challenge. So conception,
I'm not against the idea, but the challenge is just
(27:35):
members of Congress neither want to raise taxes nor cut benefits,
but come twenty thirty two, they must rate taxes or
cut benefits. So it's precisely the thing they want to do.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
The least, you know, are some combination thereof managing to
piss everybody.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Off, which is why the threat is that you'll just
borrow the money, which would really be rolling the dice.
I don't know whether financial markets will bear it, And
for the last nine years I've been on an oversight
board handling the bankruptcy of the island to Puerto Rico,
they had a similar thing. You can borrow until you
(28:13):
can't borrow, and when the markets lose faith in you,
then interest rate skyrocket. And let's just say, going through
a bankruptcy, even at the level of three million people
in Puerto Rico, is incredibly difficult. Having something like that
at the federal level, that's not just the federal finance
(28:33):
is that will destabilize the world economy. And it just
strikes these very strange that we would risk that simply
because we don't want to tell people we've got to
change how we're doing things.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Would Trump be smart to sometimes say in twenty eight
a point a Blue Ribbon commission that could report in
twenty nine and start the conversation.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
I think he would be. Both Democrats Republicans on Capitol
Hill understand that their positions are not really politically tenable.
When I speak to Republicans, they know that they're in
an incongruous position where, you know, the position now from
the President is we're never at a county benefits, but
it's also we're not going to raise taxes. They know
(29:18):
that that doesn't work, and they're kind of looking for
a way out of it. At the same time, in
the Democratic side, you know, if you go back to
the early and the Biden administration. They had control of
all of Congress and the presidency, and they had bills
in Congress to fix sols Cree entirely by raising taxes.
It had co sponsorship by something like ninety percent of
(29:41):
House Democrats. They never brought it to the floor because
they know that that kind of fix would be devastating
to them politically. So everybody has these very strong positions
in public, we will always do this, we will never
do that. In private, they know their positions are much weaker.
Some sort of mission where I hate to say smoke
(30:02):
filled rooms, but it's doing this stuff in the regular order.
It's just too difficult. So I think the president has
an opportunity there which really secretly both sides will be
grateful for her.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
That's fascinating, And I have a hunch if that happens,
you're going to be one of the people testifying and
helping design it. So this is very useful.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
That's every policy walk extreme.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
There are moments in time when you actually have to
have people who know something as opposed to know someone.
So Andrew want to thank you for joining me. Our
listeners can follow the work you're doing on SOFI Scritiform
at AI dot org. Your new book, The Real Retirement
Crisis Why Almost Everything you Know about the US Returnment
(30:46):
System Is Wrong is available now on Amazon and the
bookstores everywhere, and I really appreciate your sharing with us.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Well, thank you very much, mister speaker. It's been applied here.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Thank you to my guest Andrew Biggs. Newts World is
produced by Gingers three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producers
Guernsey Sloane. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for
the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to
the team at Ginger three sixty. If you've been enjoying
neut World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and
both rate us with five stars and give us a
(31:22):
review so others can learn what it's all about. Join
me on substack at gangerstree sixty dot net. I'm Newt Gingrich.
This is neutral
On this episode of New World, Americans and the elected
officials who represent them are worried about retirement. Many fear
a retirement crisis of inadequate savings and incomes as the
US population ages in the real retirement crisis. While almost
everything you know about the US retirement system is wrong,
(00:27):
Andrew Biggs provides economic insights and hard data to explain
to America's retirement savings situation. He argues the US retirement
system compares well to those of other developed countries. In fact,
the typical US senior is among the richest in the world.
The retirement savings gap is overwhelmingly due to government's not
(00:49):
funding benefits they promised. I'm really pleased to welcome my guests,
Andrew Biggs. He is a Senior Fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute, where he studies social security reform, state and
local government pensions, and public sector pay and benefits. Before
joining AI, he was the Principal Deputy Commissioner of the
(01:13):
Social Security Administration, where he oversaw the Social Security Administration's
policy research efforts. Andrew, welcome, and thank you for joining
(01:35):
me on Newtsworld.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Oh, thank you very much for having me. Happy to
be here.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
What drew you into what I guess now is over
twenty years of work on social security? What attracted you
to taking this on.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I was out of grad school, I was working in Washington,
d C. And I started thinking about going back to
kind of more research or hinted areas. I remember at
the time people were saying, well, do you want to
work on taxes or do you want to work on
social security? And it just struck me. Soci security it
was some more interesting in the two issues. It lets
you be a generalist, I mean, just speaking as a researcher.
(02:08):
It lets you be a generalist while actually having a
chosen profession. Social scurity is so large. It covers every
area of government, every part of people's lives, and so
it just gives you an opportunity to look at a
whole variety of different areas. And twenty five years later,
believe it or not, I'm still working on it. It's
just been a fascinating issue to work on throughout my career.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
When you work on something for a quarter century, I'm curious,
how have your views changed during that period.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
That's a very good question, I'd say, in two ways.
On social scarity, specifically, when I came into the issue,
I was working at the Cato Institute, a very libertarian
think tank, and that was the time when the sort
of social security privatization movement was very active, and I
was active in that, and I think that was a
very interesting time and it sort of had to play
(02:59):
out at the same time. When I look back at it,
I think I worked on the Jorge W. Bush reforms
in two thousand and five. I think it might have
been better if we had tried to cut a deal
then rather than wait, since every day ten thousand baby
boomers shift from becoming workers paying into the system who
care about taxes, to beneficiaries collecting from it, who care
(03:22):
much more about benefits. But over that time I also
learned a lot more about how well the US retirement
systems work. If you'd asked me twenty years ago, are
Americans saving enough for retirement? I would have said no,
because that's what you read the newspaper all the time.
Later on, I started getting much more deeply into that issue,
and you discovered, you know, Americans and the US retirement
system are really doing very well. That plays into how
(03:45):
you think about social security reform. If Americans weren't saving
for retirement on their own, then any cuts to so
security I think will be hard to justify. But when
Americans retirement savings are at record levels and poverty and
old age is at record low, you could start thinking
about things a little bit differently.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Given what may be the objective fact. There was a
survey done in twenty twenty three where eighty nine percent
of the American people agreed that there is a retirement
savings crisis.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
The survey data on the so called retirement crisis are
very interesting. Almost every survey you conduct. If you ask
Americans is there a retirement crisis, they will say yes,
and the one you cited is the evidence of that.
At the same time, if you ask retirees themselves if
they would describe their own financial situations, is a crisis,
(04:40):
as a survey by Vanguard did several years ago, only
four percent of seniors say yes. Similarly, when the Federal
Reserve asks seniors, are you finding it difficult to get
by again, it was only about four percent. And today's
workers are saving much more for retirement than people did
in the past. That's not equivocal and the data so
(05:01):
it is really a perception. I had a chapter, you know,
a retirement crisis for thee but not for me. There's
a huge split in how Americans view the whole retirement
system versus how they view their own retirement savings.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Why then, do you have this split between a general
sense that it's a huge problem, we probably can't fix it,
or the political cost of fixing it will be huge,
versus the individual who's saying, well, you know, I'm actually
pretty well off.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Well, there's a substantive reason why people worry about retirement.
If you're a thirty five year old saying, Okay, I'm
really kind of getting started now saving for retirement, what
do I have to think about? Because I want to
be able to maintain my pre retirement standard living once
I retire. You have to know, okay, what kind of
standard of living are I going to have in my fifties.
That's hard to predict. You have to know the rate
(05:55):
of return on the investments you're going to make. That's
hard to predict. You want to know how long you're
going to live, and that's hard to predict. So you
have a lot of things that are really very difficult.
So it's understandable that people are worried about it when
on top of that, you have I don't want to
call it a conspiracy, but what I'll say is nobody
has the incentive to tell Americans the truth, which is
(06:16):
that our retirement system is working pretty well. You know,
if you're in the financial industry, you know, what is
the chance that they are going to tell you you're
saving too much for retirement. They have a product to
sell and they want to keep you buying it. Likewise,
the media, are you going to click on an article
titled you know, retirement crisis coming? Or are you click?
Americans doing okay? So they have an incentive. You know,
(06:39):
they say if it leads, it leads, So they have
an incentive to gend things up. And finally, in a
political realm, there are people whose philosophical views and I'll
call it philosophical views because they're not really based in evidence,
but they just really doubt that people buy themselves can
make these sorts of decisions. They don't trust private industry,
and they would like to see it expanded role for government,
(07:01):
make social security bigger, and so forth. So once again,
they're not going to tell you the good news. I
have no incentive either way, This is purely an academic interest.
For me, it really is surprising that people who know
better will still use the scare language to try to
motivate people.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
In an article you wrote called We're going about Social
Security Reform the wrong Way, you make a strong case
that the very language, the very way we talk about
it makes it hard for us to really work our
way through what we need to be doing. Could you
expand on that.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Well, when you think about, say social security policy, think
about almost any other thing the government does, many other
policy issues. What you want to say is how do
we make this government policy or government program work better
at lower costs. So you're thinking about how the program works.
With social security policy, you're thinking almost entirely about the
(07:58):
solvency of the Social Security prom And people are choosing
from a list of items. We can raise the retirement age,
we can reduce costs to living adjustments, we can increase
the payroll tax, we can reduce benefits. And they're piecing
these pieces of a puzzle together in such a way
that they hope they get to seventy five here actual
heal balance or whatever measure they're trying to get to.
(08:21):
And I argue that's just the wrong way to think
about it. It's unproductive because it assumes that the social
security program is working perfectly, with the one exception that
it is out of financial balance. But what are the
chances that a program that was devised in nineteen thirty five,
when literally fifty percent of seniors we're living in poverty
(08:42):
is the right structure for a program for twenty thirty
five and beyond when not fifty percent of seniors are
in poverty but six and a half percent, when we
have four to one case, we have the Internet, we
have all these innovations. If you were inventing social security today,
you would think about it much differently. So, coming out
of the failure of the attempted Bush Social Secure reforms
(09:05):
in two thousand and five, I really thought it was
worthwhile to go at SOI Secure reform from a blank
slate approach and say, what would be the kind of
program we would devise for somebody who's entering the workforce today,
who might retire forty years later. What would that program
look like? And so what we should think about that is, Okay,
how do we get from here to there? Not how
(09:26):
do we patch together this system which is underfunded by
twenty six trillion dollars. Now, obviously we have to fix
the solvency issue, but thinking more broadly about the Social
Security program, what we need for what it does, opens
up opportunities. Just as an example, a high income couple
retiring today can receive almost one hundred thousand dollars in
(09:48):
Social security benefits. That's two to three times higher than
what they would receive if they were in Canada or
the UK, or Australia or New Zealand. Nobody would invent
a pro today that pays one hundred thousand dollars a
year at high income retire is they can just save
more on their own. But by the creep of the program,
where it's all on an autopilot, we're not thinking about it.
(10:10):
That's where we got So what we should be thinking
about is not simply what do we have to do
to people's benefits to make the system solving? But should
we be paying that kind of money to people who
clearly don't need it. It doesn't mean slashing that of
it's today. It just means looking over the long term,
do we want to refocus this program in a different way.
So it's thinking beyond this solvency box and just treating
(10:32):
social security as any other program. We want it to work,
we don't want to have it with excessive costs.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Wouldn't anything like that lead to almost automatic attack by
AARP unquestionable.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
One thing I remember back from the two thousand and
five experience in the Bush White House, I remember talking
to somebody about the legislative strategy for Social Security Reform,
which at the time I was very much a numbers
crime so I was not in charge of that, but
at the time AARP was the eight hundred pound gorilla.
And what I suggested to them is you either have
(11:08):
to beat AARP, debate them and defeat them, or you
have to figure out what kind of deal you have
to make with them in order to get something to pass.
And the Bush strategy just did neither of those things.
I think that was part of the failure. You just
had to decide what you were going to do. In
literally anything you do on this you are going to
be open to attack. You know, even if you cut
(11:29):
benefits by a penny for the highest income retire ARP
is going to say something. You know, they are the
union for old people. You just have to be open
to that. The only way you can avoid criticism by
ARP and groups twitched to us are well to the
left of ARP and social security would be simply to
surrender to them. So I think the key component for
(11:52):
me in the book is that when we think about
social security, we need to speak to Americans in English,
not in sort of actual al numbers. It's very tempting
to just jump into how the social security benefit formula
works and things like that. We just have to think
conceptually about what we want to do. And you know,
it's very easy to say we should have some minimum
(12:13):
benefit to keep retirees out of poverty. You know, we're
a rich country. There's not very many poor retirees. That's
something we can do to give people confidence to make
the sacrifices that are involved with reform social scurity, say
doesn't have a minimum benefit. On the other hand, it
doesn't really make sense to be paying on hundred thousand
dollars a year to two high income retirees. You know,
(12:33):
nobody else does that. There's no policy purpose for it.
That's speaking in English. Often discussions about social security are
just in this actuarial mumbo jumbo of the Bend points
to the benefit formulas or the CPI W versus chain CPI,
things that just don't make any sense to people. It
doesn't mean we lie to people. It means you convert
(12:54):
it to English to terms they can understand, and I
think that makes for a more compelling argument.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Let's say we do nothing. At what point is there
a crisis?
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Well, right now, the Social Care Trust Fund is projected
to run out in the year twenty thirty two. In
last year, Social Caurity Trustees report they predicted it would
last until twenty thirty four. But Congress actually passed two
bills this past year which made the insolvency happen sooner,
which is the opposite of what we'd want. But in
twenty thirty two, when the trust fund runs out, Social
(13:43):
Carey is still collecting a lot of money, over trillion
dollars a year in taxes. So the trust fund running
out does not mean your benefits are zero it out,
but under law it means the program could only pay
out benefits equal to what it collects in taxes. That
would mean that benefits to drop by around twenty four percent. Now,
it doesn't mean necessarily you'd have to have an across
(14:05):
the board benefit cut of twenty four percent. A lot
of people think that, and that would throw millions of
seniors into poverty. I think the president or the administration
of the time would have some discretion, but the default
position in when the trust fund runs out is you
cut benefits. Now, I don't think that's going to happen,
but to avoid cutting benefits, if Congress says we just
(14:27):
want to keep paying full benefits for everybody, and we're
to raise taxes to do it, that would be the
largest peacetime tax increase in US history, about one and
a half percent of GDP. Alternately, you know, nobody likes
to raise taxes, so ultimately they could just borrow the money.
But when we think about the size of the debt,
and when you think of the dynamics of financial markets,
(14:51):
you can borrow until financial markets lose confidence in your
ability to repay. It could be any sort of trigger
event which causes that loss of confidence. Personally, think the
federal government announcing as policy that our strategy for funding
our biggest programs to borrow money we can't possibly repay
might be the trigger. So we face a number of
(15:13):
very unpleasant choices, and the habit, the pattern for most
of the past forty years has been simply to cover
our ears, cover our eyes, and kick the can down
for the next congress. But we're running out of time
to do that.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
The nature of polemics is to avoid anything painful for
as long as possible. So I'm hearing you say that
probably not in twenty eight, but certainly by thirty two,
the presidential campaign may well be centered around this question.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
I think so young. Even for now, President Trump will
be out of office before this insolvency happens. So again,
the incentives are just not to focus on it. But
you're having the senators who will be elected this year
who will be in off us in twenty thirty two
because they have sixty year terms. So it is starting
to become a more salient issue. And the question, though,
(16:08):
is how our political process handles this. The difficulty we
face on sol scary form or any large issue is
a number of hurdles you have to come over to
make anything pass into law. You have to get it
through the House, which means the majority. Then you have
to get sixty votes in the Senate. Then you have
to hope the President signs it, and then most likely
(16:28):
somehow it ends up in the Supreme Court, it's just
a very high hurdle to overcome. In other countries with
parliamentary systems, you know, it's a simple majority, and they've
been able to reform their systems much better than we have.
With the exception of France, most countries have reformed their pensions,
you know, in the past couple of decades. So we
really face a challenge.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Are there particularly successful structural reforms that you think we
should look at and begin to think about this conversation.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
In the look the real retirement crisis. When I look
at other countries, I try to say, what do other
countries who are like the US do with pensions? You
could look at what is happening in France or Lichtenstein,
but where they're just very different countries from the US.
What I think of countries that are similar, I think
of certain Anglo countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia,
(17:21):
and New Zealand. They're by and large free market, limited
government countries. The interesting thing is our social security program
is very different from theirs. They focus much more of
their resources on preventing poverty in old age and much
less on essentially running a pension system. For upper middle
(17:42):
class people. You know the example I use. You know,
if you have a high income couple today retiring under
Social Security, they could get somewhere on ninety six thousand
dollars per year in benefits. If that same couple were
retiring in Canada, they get less than thirty thousand dollars
a year in benefits. Now, rich Canadians are not starving
in retirement in Canada, they're just saving more on their own.
(18:05):
You know, if you were in the UK, or if
you're in Australia and New Zealand, the benefits are more
generous at the bottom, but they are capped at a
much lower level. And what that means essentially is you know,
people say, well, that turns social Security into a welfare program. Well,
government is good at running welfare programs. Government is terrible
at running pension systems. If you look around the world,
(18:25):
the sort of retirement savings gaps that people reference are
almost entirely a function of governments failing to fund the
benefits that they've promised. They run these programs, we owe
trillion dollars in money, but we put nothing aside for it.
So government is good at running safety nets. And you
know every developed country has a safety net. It's terrible
(18:47):
at saving for the future. So what we should do
is simply expand for one k's and other retirement savings
program To expand retirement savings on top of social security
will refocusing social security more on its role as a
safety program and less as an upper middle class entitlement.
That's how other countries do this, and there's different formulas.
(19:09):
For Australia as a means tested minimum benefit with universal
fore and ks. New Zealand has a universal benefit, everybody
gets it. It's not means tested, and if you want
to save on top of that, it's voluntary. So there's
different flavors of doing it, but the key is simply
focus your resources where they're needed. Government shouldn't do things
(19:31):
that people could would and should do on their own. America,
they're amply able to save for retirement on their own.
Savings have never been higher, so let's focus more on
expanding that and refocus social security on its core mission.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
In the current debate about COVID subsidies for health insurance,
I think we currently subsidize up to nine hundred percent
above poverty.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
At that point, it's not a poverty program.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
The bold proposal is to reduce that to seven percent
above poverty. In some ways, we've become addicted to upper
middle class subsidies by the government, which are in a
sense paid for by the very people who will get
into subsidy.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
You know, you higher taxes on rich people to have
higher Social Security benefits to rich people. It's very inexpensive
to protect low income people via Social Security form. You know,
if you google Social Security form, everything will be about
anti poverty or safety net or things like that. We
could give every senior a social scarity benefit set at
(20:36):
the poverty line, so that literally no one has a
sub poverty level income taking poverty zero. That would cost
about half as much as we're currently paying on the
Social Security program. Although all the language the discussion is
about the safety net, all the money is actually for
middle class, upper middle class people. If you're just a
(20:56):
middle income couple retiring today at the retirement ages now
sixty seven, you would get around fifty eight thousand dollars
in Social Security benefits for a safety debt program. That's
three times the poverty threshold before you've touched a penny
of your own savings, which are at record levels. So
it's one of these things where the rhetoric just doesn't
(21:18):
match the reality of where the money is going.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
How deep do you think, How intense do you think
the pushback would be if you tried to go to
that kind of program?
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Oh, I think it would be intense. Where I think
there is some avenue for progress is this. If you
ask progressives what would you do to fix Social Security?
Almost universally they'll say, we should lift the cap on
earrings subject to the Social Security payroll tax. This year
(21:48):
you're taxed up to one hundred and seventy six thousand dollars.
You earn benefits on that same kind of cap earrings.
Anything above that you neither are tax nor your own benefits.
And so they say, let's eliminate that. There's a variety
of proposals to either do it immediately or phase it out. Now,
that's again the largest peace time tax increase in history, folks,
and a very small number of people. And you say, well,
(22:11):
why would progressives be willing to combine on that? Isn't
this what they want? The issue is that every other
progressive priority depends on that very same money. Probably the
best argument I can think of from a conservative standpoint
or fiscal conservative standpoint of fixing so scare a boy
raising taxes and the rich. At that point, the rich
(22:32):
people are tapped out. You're not going to have green
new deal, you're not going to have Medicare for all,
You're not going to have all these other things that
the progressives want, simply because they've decided to use all
that money to pay higher social security benefits to rich people.
When you talk to progressives, they kind of get this.
It's a standard thing in politics or public policy that
(22:55):
every person work in their area thinks all that extra
money is going to go to their priority. There's somebody
next door at the thing tank it works in some
other issue thinks they're going to get the money. Well,
they're not all going to get the money. There's an
opportunity cost, even for progressives on this. And I've noticed this,
you know, as I've been talking about these issues over
the years, Not just conservatives I talked to, but progressive
(23:16):
policy people are like, yeah, you kind of have a point.
Anything on this would be very very hard politically, and
so it's how do you manage the process. I honestly
don't think what you'd call the regular order can handle this.
I think you need some sort of commission or extrajudicial
process or political process. Just can't do this.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Peter Drucker used to say that if you weren't already
doing something, would you start? And if the is no,
why are you still doing it? If you had a
blank slate today, given how the world has evolved, and
you could design the optimum lifetime retirement program, what would
it look like?
Speaker 2 (24:14):
I think I've do two things. I mean, the only
reason we are going to pay one hundred thousand dollars
in benefits so high in a couple next year is
we're doing that this year. Nobody would invent that from
a scratch. And so in the book, I go through
this thought exercise of you know, if I were inventing
Social Security from a blank slate, what would it look like?
You can't reinvent the program for people retiring today, they've
(24:36):
paid their taxes, they've made their plans. But for somebody's
just entering the workforce today, they haven't paid anything into
the system, they're not owed anything. So for them, we
can do whatever we want. And then you sort of
phase into it. But the idea is you would want
to have a strong minimum benefit so that people are
not going to retire into poverty. I mean, we are
the richest country in the world, with the richest seniors
(24:57):
in the world. It's not too much to ask to
prevent poverty in old age. So you would have some
sort of universal benefit set at the poverty threshold that
just guarantees against that people can go their working lives
knowing with certainty they will not retire into poverty. That's
something government is good at. For retirement income on top
(25:19):
of that, which is not anti poverty, but it's more
sort of income replacement to maintain your pre retirement standard living.
That's where personal savings come in. So I think that
everybody should be offered a retirement plan at work, meaning
you know, four to oh one K or similar. Everybody
should be enrolled in that plan. That This could be
what people call automatic enrollment where you have the chance
(25:40):
to pull out, which is sort of what you have
in the UK or New Zealand, or it could be
mandatory enrollment, which is what you have in Australia. And
there's pros and cons to each. Compared to something like
fixing medicare, this is really a very easy problem to solve.
It's just common sense.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Aren't there a couple of programs ms like in Britain
where at birth you get an initial grant of money
that's in a savings account.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
That's similar to what they're calling now the Trump accounts.
I have mixed feelings in the sense that a lot
of the motivation for that is sort of a numbers game.
They're just saying, well, we borrow the money. Yeah, we
borrowed a five percent. We can invest it seven percent
or whatever and have some sort of arbitrage on it.
And you know, for reasons that economists care about that,
(26:31):
most other people don't. I could explain why that doesn't
make a difference, but you know, I think the issue
we face on that and this was sort of the
motivation for the personal accounts for Social Security sake back
in the Bush ear before. At that point, social Security
was throwing off extra money. We're collecting more in taxes
than we need and benefits, and so the question is
(26:52):
what do you do with that money? Government was spending it,
and the accounts would have helped save it. The idea
of these accounts at birth baby bonds or Trump accounts
is okay, you can get ahead of the game. The
problem you face financially is that does nothing for SOLI
security in the short term, and members of Congress they're
to have to come up with money to find these
(27:13):
accounts for the long term. But then they're still going
to have to come up with money to address the
social security problem that's staring us down in twenty thirty two.
You know, in the short term, it makes the financial
problem harder, and the short term is what most politicians
think about. So I think that is the challenge. So conception,
I'm not against the idea, but the challenge is just
(27:35):
members of Congress neither want to raise taxes nor cut benefits,
but come twenty thirty two, they must rate taxes or
cut benefits. So it's precisely the thing they want to do.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
The least, you know, are some combination thereof managing to
piss everybody.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Off, which is why the threat is that you'll just
borrow the money, which would really be rolling the dice.
I don't know whether financial markets will bear it, And
for the last nine years I've been on an oversight
board handling the bankruptcy of the island to Puerto Rico,
they had a similar thing. You can borrow until you
(28:13):
can't borrow, and when the markets lose faith in you,
then interest rate skyrocket. And let's just say, going through
a bankruptcy, even at the level of three million people
in Puerto Rico, is incredibly difficult. Having something like that
at the federal level, that's not just the federal finance
(28:33):
is that will destabilize the world economy. And it just
strikes these very strange that we would risk that simply
because we don't want to tell people we've got to
change how we're doing things.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Would Trump be smart to sometimes say in twenty eight
a point a Blue Ribbon commission that could report in
twenty nine and start the conversation.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
I think he would be. Both Democrats Republicans on Capitol
Hill understand that their positions are not really politically tenable.
When I speak to Republicans, they know that they're in
an incongruous position where, you know, the position now from
the President is we're never at a county benefits, but
it's also we're not going to raise taxes. They know
(29:18):
that that doesn't work, and they're kind of looking for
a way out of it. At the same time, in
the Democratic side, you know, if you go back to
the early and the Biden administration. They had control of
all of Congress and the presidency, and they had bills
in Congress to fix sols Cree entirely by raising taxes.
It had co sponsorship by something like ninety percent of
(29:41):
House Democrats. They never brought it to the floor because
they know that that kind of fix would be devastating
to them politically. So everybody has these very strong positions
in public, we will always do this, we will never
do that. In private, they know their positions are much weaker.
Some sort of mission where I hate to say smoke
(30:02):
filled rooms, but it's doing this stuff in the regular order.
It's just too difficult. So I think the president has
an opportunity there which really secretly both sides will be
grateful for her.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
That's fascinating, And I have a hunch if that happens,
you're going to be one of the people testifying and
helping design it. So this is very useful.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
That's every policy walk extreme.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
There are moments in time when you actually have to
have people who know something as opposed to know someone.
So Andrew want to thank you for joining me. Our
listeners can follow the work you're doing on SOFI Scritiform
at AI dot org. Your new book, The Real Retirement
Crisis Why Almost Everything you Know about the US Returnment
(30:46):
System Is Wrong is available now on Amazon and the
bookstores everywhere, and I really appreciate your sharing with us.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Well, thank you very much, mister speaker. It's been applied here.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Thank you to my guest Andrew Biggs. Newts World is
produced by Gingers three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producers
Guernsey Sloane. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for
the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to
the team at Ginger three sixty. If you've been enjoying
neut World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and
both rate us with five stars and give us a
(31:22):
review so others can learn what it's all about. Join
me on substack at gangerstree sixty dot net. I'm Newt Gingrich.
This is neutral
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