Upcoming Event: Savings and Retirement Foundation with Peter Brady, March 10

Please join us for a meeting of the Savings and Retirement Foundation with guest speaker Peter Brady

He will be discussing his new book:
"How America Supports Retirement: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Who Benefits"
Thursday, March 10, 2016
Noon - 1pm
The Tax Foundation
1325 G Street, NW
Suite 950 
Washington, DC 20005
RSVP
Lunch will be provided.
This is a widely attended event.
Abstract
Assuring retirement security is a challenge for American workers, for their employers—and for the country’s policymakers. Government policy supports retirement preparedness primarily through two mechanisms: Social Security, which is a mandatory contributory pension for all workers, and tax deferral, which provides incentives for employers to offer and workers to participate in voluntary retirement plans.  Yet the combined effect of these two mechanisms is poorly understood—and subject to widespread myths.

In a new book, How America Supports Retirement: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Who Benefits, economist Peter Brady of the Investment Company Institute challenges the notion of an “upside-down” retirement system that only benefits the wealthy.
Brady’s innovative work is the first to use a consistent metric—a tax expenditure estimate—to measure the benefits of both tax deferral and Social Security. It illustrates that higher earners benefit more from tax deferral not because of their higher tax rates, but because the design of Social Security creates a strong incentive for them to defer more of their compensation.

In findings that bear directly upon today’s pressing policy debates, Brady demonstrates that the full system of government support for retirement is indeed progressive and warns that tax proposals to limit or fundamentally change tax deferral would actually make the code less fair.