By James Kwak

A couple of weeks go I wrote an op-ed about a proposal in Connecticut to create a new tax-preferred retirement plan that would, by default, include almost all workers who don’t currently have access to an employment-based plan (like a 401(k)). That proposal took some major steps forward when it was included in an end-of-session bill that was passed by the Connecticut legislature. As it stands, the bill authorizes a feasibility study and implementation plan for the new retirement option, which must contain a number of features (default enrollment, portability, default annuitization at retirement, a guaranteed return to be specified at the beginning of each year, etc.).

As I said in the op-ed, this is a decent step forward that will increase the amount of retirement saving by low- and middle-income workers, put those savings in a relatively low-cost, low-risk investment option, and spread some of the benefits of the retirement tax break to those workers (although you do have to pay income tax to benefit from the deduction). One of the claims made by the plan’s opponents is that it cannot be managed for less than the 1 percent of assets mandated by the bill, but that seems laughable to me: the State of Connecticut’s current retirement plans for its employees have administrative costs of 10 basis points, plus investment expense ratios as low as 2 basis points (for index funds from Vanguard). This is a slightly different animal, since the idea is to invest in low-risk securities and buy downside insurance, but still it doesn’t follow that you have to pay more than 1 percent for asset management is.

Connecticut is one of several states, most famously California, that are in the process of implementing these public retirement plans to cover people who are left out by the current “system,” which favors people who work for large companies.   They can solve several of the common problems with 401(k) plans: nonexistence (at many employers), low participation rates, investment risk, pre-retirement withdrawals, lump-sum distributions at retirement, to name a few.

But they can’t solve the underlying problem, which is that many people just don’t make enough for saving 3 percent of their salary each year to make much of a difference. A big constraint is that the Connecticut plan was designed to not cost taxpayers any money: administrative fees will come out of plan balances, and the insurance is there to limit the chance that the state will have to bail out the plan in the future. If we really want to protect people against retirement risk, we need to actually spread risk by making either the funding mechanism or the benefit formula progressive, which means we can’t regard the idea of the untouchable individual account as sacrosanct. (See my recent paper for more on this topic.) That’s what Social Security does, and it’s vastly popular. But in today’s political environment of me me me me me, and so we’re stuck with treating symptoms.

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