public domain; https:\/\/pxhere.com\/en\/photo\/973959<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>Yes, I know, the Ben Shapiro meme is \u201cfacts don\u2019t care about your feelings.\u201d\u00a0 But here\u2019s the deal:<\/p>\n
Retirement is back as a topic of discussion in Congress, so, yay, me, I guess, since I have lots to write about, anyway, and today there was a hearing at the House Ways and Means Committee, which I had thought was narrowly about the new \u201cexpand Social Security\u201d bill which the Democrats have great hopes for, but turned out to be a hearing on retirement issues more generally speaking, including questions of retirement savings, and how prepared Americans are, or aren\u2019t, for retirement, and multiemployer plans as well, though my the time I started watching the livestream, 1 1\/2 hours in, there really wasn\u2019t much said about that.\u00a0 There were experts from both ends of the spectrum, namely, Nancy Altmann, head of a group pushing expansion of Social Security benefits funded by eliminating the cap; and Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute, who writes that the \u201cretirement crisis\u201d really isn\u2019t that bad because the Golden Era of defined-benefit plans wasn\u2019t that Golden for many people, and that data shows people are, on average, doing better now.\u00a0 There was a representative of a large employer, and there was a small businessman who was one of the first participating employers in OregonSaves, and there was a woman who, near as I could tell, was a widow of a multiemployer plan participant, whose plan must have gone insolvent or else she\u2019s just worried it will, who got involved in an advocacy group, and there were one or two others.<\/p>\n
So it was interesting, and I\u2019ll be using some of the prepared testimony as source material for articles at Forbes, but I wanted to share a little about the hearing itself first, because it was the first time I really set out to watch one of these suckers at length (and it was loooong, starting at 9 and still going on at 1:00 when I moved on to other things, though I was multitasking and dividing my attention between this \u2014 on my tablet \u2014 and my computer).<\/p>\n
Some of the Congress-questioners were actively keen on using this session to learn things.\u00a0 They had prepared, but they also asked questions to which they genuinely did not know the answer.<\/p>\n
Others grandstanded.<\/p>\n
Now, when I first started watching, I was babysitting a macro on my upstairs computer, while watching on the downstairs computer, so I tried to use the grandstanders\u2019 5 minutes to run upstairs and back down, once it was clear that what they were doing was ranting.\u00a0 But it would have been useful for the session to have been split up, with everyone who wanted to use their time to make little speeches to do so, followed by the questions, or, better yet, the reverse.<\/p>\n
And some of the grandstanding was nominally in the form of a question, for instance, a long discourse on how many workers have physically demanding jobs (weird example:\u00a0 kindergarten teacher) so that an increase in the retirement age causes hardship for them.\u00a0 It\u2019s a fair concern.\u00a0 But instead of asking, \u201care there ways we can increase the retirement age for those who can handle it with creating burdens for those who can\u2019t?\u201d for instance, she asked a question which was directed at the expand-Social-Security witness, Altmann, to the effect of, \u201cdo you agree with me?\u201d\u00a0 And the answer, of course, was \u201cyes\u201d (though Altmann did add some color, such as the fact that disability approval can take so long people will commence their retirement benefits with early-retirement reductions instead).\u00a0 And another example:\u00a0 \u201cgosh, will increasing immigration help Social Security funding?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWhy, yes, it will.\u201d<\/p>\n
But, man, early on (relative to when I started watching), Biggs said something reasonably level-headed and measured.\u00a0 But then it was the next Congressman\u2019s turn.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember who it was.\u00a0 But his remarks \u2014 well, he brought on the outrage.\u00a0 To paraphrase him very loosely, he thundered something to the effect of, \u201coh, sure, you have your fancy statistics.\u00a0 But I know better than that.\u00a0 My feelings don\u2019t care about your facts<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\nTo be sure, he was followed (and I don\u2019t really know if any of this is planned out) by someone with a wholly different approach, saying, \u201cthis is a math problem,\u201d and coming with Ross Perot-ian graphics on the old-age dependency ratio, the increasing share of federal spending going to old folks via Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and miscellaneous other programs, and so on.<\/p>\n
And a third Congressman, a Republican, directly addressed Altmann, saying (again paraphrased, from memory), \u201cwe know we need a solution to all of this.\u00a0 We also know that we need a true bipartisan solution, one that comes from the center, which means that there will be some parts of the outcome that you won\u2019t like.\u00a0 Will you still support it?\u201d\u00a0 And she answered \u201cYes,\u201d but then qualified her yes with a statement that she conceived of the issue not as \u201ccenter vs. right and left\u201d but \u201celites vs. the common people,\u201d which raised warning bells that she might not really be ready to accept an outcome that doesn\u2019t conform to her expectations.<\/p>\n
So in one sense, it\u2019s not really a retirement issue per se; it\u2019s a challenge, in general, in any case where the statistics around a topic are hard to grasp and don\u2019t intuitively feel right compared to other data points and anecdote and personal experience.\u00a0 How do you persuade people to trust math and analysis that doesn\u2019t line up with what they expect?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yes, I know, the Ben Shapiro meme is \u201cfacts don\u2019t care about your feelings.\u201d\u00a0 But here\u2019s the deal: Retirement is back as a topic of discussion in Congress, so, yay, me, I guess, since I have lots to write about, anyway, and today there was a hearing at the House Ways and Means Committee, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[660,1186,471,1183],"class_list":["post-12697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-congress","tag-facts","tag-math","tag-statistics"],"yoast_head":"\n
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