Academics are on the march, coming for the defined contribution retirement savings system with policy prescriptions that would fundamentally change employer-sponsored plans and what they’re designed to do. The system is failing; it only benefits the wealthy and doesn’t produce adequate retirement income, which is the chorus of commonly heard criticism.
American Retirement Association CEO Brian Graff is joined by Peter Brady, a senior economist for retirement and investor research at the Investment Company Institute, to counter the claims. Brady brings the data to dispute the latest attacks and discuss what’s driving the attacks.
Academics are on the march, coming for the defined contribution retirement savings system with policy prescriptions that would fundamentally change employer-sponsored plans and what they’re designed to do. The system is failing; it only benefits the wealthy and doesn’t produce adequate retirement income, which is the chorus of commonly heard criticism.
American Retirement Association CEO Brian Graff is joined by Peter Brady, a senior economist for retirement and investor research at the Investment Company Institute, to counter the claims. Brady brings the data to dispute the latest attacks and discuss what’s driving the attacks.
It's the idea that there's a massive retirement crisis as well. Way overstate it. I'm not saying there aren't issues. There are many issues going forward, DC.
Speaker 2:Pension Geeks brings you exclusive conversations with top retirement policymakers and regulators in and around Washington DC, hosted by Brian Graff, an attorney, accountant, former Capitol Hill staffer and CEO of the American Retirement Association. If you're looking for an insider's view of all the twists and turns that Washington takes on the road to ensuring a secure retirement for millions of Americans, you're in the right place. Welcome to DC Pension Geeks.
Speaker 3:Hello everybody, welcome to another podcast of the DC Pension Geeks podcast series. I'm very fortunate today to have Peter Brady from the Investment Company Institute. Some of you may remember I think we had Eric Pan, peter's boss, a while back to talk in general about what ICI is focused on. Peter has a very long history working on economic issues in the finance area. Actually, peter, just a quick second. How did you end up? Obviously, you've got an economic background, of course, but how did you end up focused on financial services, the economic policy as it applies to the finance area? How did you?
Speaker 1:end up here. Sure Well, the short version is I came to DC in the mid-90s after getting a PhD from the University of Wisconsin. I spent nearly a decade as a government economist, so at the Federal Reserve Board and then the Treasury Department. Then I came to ICI in 2005. Now I can flesh it out a little bit, tell you a little bit more about my background in ICI and my research. My background is a public finance and tax, so that's my specialty. I focus on capital taxation under the income tax. That's my link to the financial markets.
Speaker 1:I've covered in my job before, covered issues doing housing, dividends, capital gains and pensions and retirement policy. Obviously, my job in the government was to analyze data, look at policy issues, legislation, regulation and do my own long-term research. I got a call from ICI in 2005. I was a bit intrigued. I was really out there looking.
Speaker 1:What intrigued me is that so ICI as a trade group, as you know, represent regulated funds like mutual funds and ETFs, but sort of as a historical accident or as a historical background, we're kind of a strange trade group and that we've always had a large research department. For example, right now we have eight PhDs on staff. Essentially, I came over, because I was able to do essentially the same things I was doing for the government, that is, analyze data, work on policy issues and do my own long-term research, but just do it outside the government, also with a little more direct focus on pension issues, which is where my pensions and retirement policy, which is where my research was going. Anyways, I've researched things like pension coverage, income that retirees get, how do you measure retirement adequacy and the tax treatment of employer plans in IRAs.
Speaker 3:We're certainly grateful that ICI has committed so much energy and resources to research, because obviously there seems to be and it's really a someone who represents the retirement plan system there seems to be this sort of huge number of folks on the academic side economists who are in academia and even in some of the other think tanks that are constantly attacking the private retirement plan system. I've been doing retirement policy for over 30 years now and it's pretty much the same chorus that the system is only benefiting the wealthy. The system is failing most workers. The system doesn't produce adequate retirement income due to the shift from defined benefit to defined contribution. You've really been one of the few voices that have been countering that with actual data. What do you think is driving this constant barrage of attacks on a system that really has been the only way we've ever gotten middle income Americans to build wealth and invest in the markets?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good question. I think there's a couple issues going on. One is, I think unfortunately people try to examine employer plans in isolation and in fact, the US retirement system has two major components. You've got a mandatory pension that has a progressive benefit schedule, which is social security, and then you have a voluntary pension system where workers can supplement social security benefits in retirement. What matters is not how much you get from either one of those two components, but what you get from the combination of the two In a lot of times, because people don't understand the US social security system well enough or don't accurately model it.
Speaker 1:When you just look at what people get from employer plans, it is you can look at the data and it may not make sense. When you pull in a social security system, I think the system makes a whole lot more sense and that's what a lot of my work has tried to do. I think the other thing going on is we actually have a mis-measurement in a lot of our data. The typical way we get information on plans are large household surveys done by the government and, for whatever reason, they've under-measured the amount of resources people get from employer plans and IRAs what they hold in terms of assets in plans.
Speaker 3:I guess they don't see it as something that they have if it's in Some of the surveys are.
Speaker 1:The SCF is probably pretty good on some of it, cps not so much. Yeah, it's mainly we're missing the income the SCF actually shows. Most households, by the time they hit retirement, have accumulated resources from employer plans and IRAs either benefits in DB plan, assets in a DC or IRA or both. There was a puzzle about we saw all these people with these assets but then we didn't see the income in retirement, and it's a puzzle of why that occurs. It occurs in multiple things, but in particular where we get our national statistics from the current population survey.
Speaker 1:Our national income statistics has been really bad and so early on through joint work. So there's a. Once I left, I worked with Tax State, obviously while I was at Treasury, but after I left the IRS Statistics of Income Division has a joint research program where you can put in proposals for studies and if you get approved you can actually use the raw tax data and so in there there's a whole lot more income from these plans than you see in the household surveys. And then it wasn't just my research did it that actually the Census Bureau has a special division where they take the survey data and they're able to link it with the tax data. They can't talk to any other part of the census, by the way. They can just put out the general report, but they confirm that it's missing a whole lot of it. So retirees were missing a huge share of their income. Most of that under measurement is coming from measuring retirement plan income.
Speaker 3:So why, given what you just said, you made the statement most American households actually have a reasonable amount of resources when they reach retirement, that the income that they're getting from retirement is under measured, and we've got now data that shows that it's much more than what people have perceived. Why are we consistently getting these studies over and over again by academics? There was one last week that was released by MIT, which you probably saw again showing that the system is failing most American workers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I don't want to specifically come out on the latest proposal or latest paper because it's 130 pages long and I've skimmed it. But in general I think.
Speaker 3:But it's part of the same thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, some of the best academic research actually does show it. I mean, I think the best paper in the area was a 2006 AER paper that my researchers at my alma mater and they showed that most Americans seemed to be preparing properly for retirement. It's a very complex paper. It went into a very complicated life cycle model, so a lot of it is perhaps not the deep academic research, but certainly look, when you look at average balances and you look at a lot of things.
Speaker 1:It's easy to put simple statistics up and say this is nuts. People don't have enough. You have to really look at the whole system. You got to look at what they get from social security and from employer plans. Social security has a very progressive benefit schedule. It actually is designed to replace most of the income at the very bottom of the. For people with low lifetime earners, it is supposed to be the only full replacement of their wages and as it goes up, the replacement rate goes down. But the assets some people don't even understand that the higher you earn, the more you get from social security. It goes up slowly and that's what makes it progressive, but it goes up, and so even for middle income and higher income people a lot of times it's dismissed how important social security system is and you have to look at it in common, so I think.
Speaker 1:And then the other thing is maybe not a good awareness of what typical income is. So the people look at retirees and go, oh, this is the median income. I mean I saw one paper said this terrible, this median income of retirees. Now they probably under measured it because of the reasons we've talked about, but it wasn't that different from median income of people who were working for a living. So I think, particularly in Washington, which is not exactly a poor area, people may look at some numbers and go, oh my gosh, how do those people live? And the fact of the matter is a lot of people live that way, most people live that way and they live, but before and after. But from my research again, as you said, I find most people are able to maintain a standard of living when you look at the data.
Speaker 3:So a lot of the focus of these papers, peter, is around tax incidents. And then what I mean by that and I know you understand what I'm saying is that there tends to be an over emphasis on the current tax incentives and the fact that they're structured and because they are represented, generally speaking, either well, a deferment of taxes in the current year, whether it's a employee contribution if they're doing a pre-tax contribution or an employer contribution in the form of a match or other type of either defined benefit contribution on their behalf or defined contribution, profit sharing contribution on their behalf. The benefit to any particular worker is predicated on what their marginal tax rate is, and obviously we have a progressive tax system. So for more moderate income workers, their marginal tax rates are lower. For higher income workers, their marginal tax rates are higher.
Speaker 3:So the economic analysis focuses on the fact that we're giving wealthy people a higher incentive because their marginal rate is higher. We're giving lower people, lower income people, a lower marginal rate, and that's backwards and it's sort of go on and on about that. Obviously we have a progressive tax code. That's just the way the system is. What's behind those arguments?
Speaker 1:Okay, so I wrote a very long paper and actually a book on the topic, and part of it is is understanding the benefits of tax deferral is actually kind of difficult. It's difficult for non-economists to understand, it's difficult for economists who aren't tax economists to understand, it's difficult for tax economists who don't focus on it to understand, and it's even difficult for us who focus on it if we haven't thought about it for a few months. So it can get, but what I've tried to do is work on trying to explain it, and so I think one of the issues is there's a confusion of people understand deductions and exclusions pretty well. So you get a deduction for your mortgage interest payment, you get exclusion for healthcare, you get a or even credits where you get money to buy electric cars, and those are easy fairly easy to understand because they only affect your tax liability this year, and the basic intuition is absolutely correct that you just take how much you deduct and you multiply it by your marginal tax rate and thus, for every dollar you deduct you get more benefits the higher your income tax rates are. So one of the issues that I've tried to explain is that deferral is much more complicated than that because it affects taxes over your lifetime. So let's take a tax deferred contribution, lower your taxes when you put it in, all right, because you exclude it from your income, and so you don't pay taxes today. While it's growing over time, you get earn capital gains, dividends, and those aren't taxed, but at the end you do pay taxes on everything you withdraw. And so it's a combination of three different effects.
Speaker 1:And so the point I try to make is deferral is different. Okay, so I have two kids. One isn't better than the other, they're different. Okay, this is like different. I'm not saying tax deferral is better or worse. Some cases it's better, some types it's worse. It's just different from a deduction, and what it turns out is your marginal tax rate actually has less to do with it than you think. Okay, so essentially let's assume a simple case just to get the understanding is if your tax rates don't change over time, tax you pay at the end basically is paying back with interest the tax you saved when you put the money in. So what's left over is you would have paid taxes on interest, dividends, capital gains along the way, and that's your benefit. Well, it turns out.
Speaker 3:So just to interrupt, I mean the deferral in the long run costs the government significantly less than a pure deduction.
Speaker 1:Generally, yes, I mean. So I can come up with examples where you have a long deferral period and it can actually be more, but for generally over a lifetime. And that's why I wrote to one paper just on doing the benefits per dollar, because it's very complex, and then doing over a lifetime. And, yes, it is much lower than generally, than what you would get from the index. So it turns out, particularly for higher income people, deferral has a bigger effect on when taxes are paid than the total amount of taxes over your lifetime. Now, it does lower, it does reduce the taxes you pay over a lifetime, but it has more effect on are you paying it when you're working or you paying it when you retire? And so I think it's hard to understand these things. And so, for example, it turns out your age may have a bigger effect on your benefits than your marginal tax rate, because what's really important is how long you defer the taxes. And so I think that's complex and I'll stop there and then you overlay the fact.
Speaker 3:That way, there's something that Congress considers that you hear it's written about in these papers the idea around something called tax expenditures. It's something that the Joint Committee on Taxation puts out every year and that there's an enormous number attached to the tax incentives associated with retirement savings, but that what they don't do is take into account the point that you're making, that that's a deferral, because Congress uses this 10-year budget window that ignores the fact not in all cases, but in a lot of cases that people are going to quote pay that tax back or partially pay that tax back when the money comes out of retirement solution.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's even more complex than that because there's a distinction between what a tax expenditure is and what a revenue estimate is. And so the tax expenditures were conceived back after the war. Basically it started to build and there was actually a gentleman at Treasury Surrey who basically pushed the idea of having a tax expenditure budget, and the idea at the time actually had nothing to do with fairness or distributional analysis or anything like that. The only point was look, every year Congress has to pass appropriations. So if we have a program that say assists housing, if every year you have to, if it's an expenditure you got to look at every year, if it's in the tax code it's never looked at. And basically what he wanted to do is say look, we give, there are things we encourage through the tax code, and at that time it was a much different tax code. There were a lot of different. I mean 86, we really winnowed the tree of the different deductions that were there. We've been putting the ornaments back on that tree over time, but the idea there was to put this under the same scrutiny. And so the tax expenditure concept is not a revenue estimate. The idea is suppose we change one item in the tax code didn't change anything else, how would revenue change? And that's the estimate.
Speaker 1:So tax deferral has its difficulties because there are two different estimates for tax expenditures for deferral. The main estimate actually is a very strange content to think about distributionally, because what it's doing is taking the money you lose from contributions made in the current year, the money you lose on any investment gains in the pension, plus the deductions, minus the deduction or the taxes you collect on the people. It's not even the same people. So the idea of distributing that doesn't make sense. Then they do another one which is a present value, which says from here until eternity, what are the things Then? The other issue is the tax. The revenue estimates, and certainly the revenue estimates have an issue that if you say, got rid of deferral, the amount you raised in the window is probably going to be much higher than the long term because again what you're doing is shifting.
Speaker 3:You're going to be collecting a lot more taxes on workers today, but when they retire, you do a lot and we see that now with a lot of this ideas to Rothify things. Right, I know that's not a word, but to allow for things to be on a rock or require, in the case of catch up contributions, them to be Roth in reality probably raises more money quote in the window than in the long term.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I mean you get proposals that are Roth, that say, expand the amount you can put away, that actually raise money in the window. Yes, because it doesn't take into account the money you're not collecting later.
Speaker 3:Exactly, so there's this distortion in policy that is a result of that, but there's also this distortion in terms of the perception that we continue to have through. The press picks up on these papers that talk about the failure of the 401K system, and it sounds like there's a lot of actual, real evidence that shows that what is being claimed is inaccurate either in terms of who's benefiting, the amount that they're accumulating and the amount of income it's producing. So what is the industry doing wrong, peter, in your view, in terms of communicating the success of the 401K system?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, I think first of all, we have to communicate the success. I think there are too many voices, so I have to be careful on this, but there is a no, it's a podcast.
Speaker 3:No one listens to this.
Speaker 1:So look, there is a great. I think there is a this idea that there's a massive retirement crisis as well. Way overstate it.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying there aren't issues, there are many issues going forward, and particularly the funding of Social Security is a huge problem. We have to take care of that. We've been avoiding, the country has been avoiding, but I think in some sense. Look, I think financial services firms are used to trying to get people to save as much as possible. That's their business, and so I don't blame them for sitting at a table and say you need to save more, and I'm okay with that too, because I also think that Well for the most people. They're not going to over, I'm not too worried.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for the most Americans, that's the right advice.
Speaker 1:And so there's this. But Overstating how much more savings we need and all this stuff I don't think is particularly productive, because mainly because I don't see that in the data. I'm not saying everyone is doing great and everyone's behaving rationally, but on average people seem to be doing what I would predict they would do from a model on average.
Speaker 3:And so I'll tell you what I'm going to make it easier. I'm going to say what I think you're saying. I think what you're saying is, as an industry, we have this tendency, because we're in the business of accumulating assets, to constantly be messaging you're not saving enough, you're not saving enough. And that feeds into this narrative that some of these economists are pushing out, that the system is failing.
Speaker 1:I think so, and I think it's counterproductive bait because it's not true, and I don't think it's particularly so. I worked in the government and my job was to tell them what they couldn't say. But if people want to say things, the worst to me were things that were both untrue and not useful, and so I think it's counterproductive in the policy debate, because what you're saying is the current system is failing, and it's an. If the current system is failing, it's not too unreasonable response to say, well, then throw the whole system out, and I think that's what's happened in some cases.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think I do think perhaps we need to rethink as an industry how we're talking about the 401k system and doing a better job of touting that success and just to transition over to the throwing it out idea. So there are some of your economists.
Speaker 1:Let me take a step back. I can do research on the data, but what's convincing are anecdotes. So you can have the best day in the world and you have a story that is best, and so it would be helpful. Now I don't have the anecdotes because I don't have the data on an individual basis, but certainly we should talk about this.
Speaker 3:Oh, there's plenty of great stories about the success of the 401k, without question. So two of your economists colleagues, Alicia Monal, Annie Biggs, again in the same vein of throwing the system out and in connection with Social Security, toss this idea somewhat like a hand grenade to let's just get rid of all the incentives for 401k plans and use that quote money in the budget window to shore up Social Security funding, which you know, but some of the listeners may not realize, the Social Security trustees report recently indicate or think it was Congressional Budget Office in this case that the expectation is that Social Security will go into deficit spending by in 2033, which would result in automatic cuts and benefits something in the order of 24%, I believe. So what's your reaction to this sort of Pretty am I? I think I called it preposterous idea.
Speaker 1:Well, I have to say I'm not a big fan of it. And look, both social security and employer sponsored plans are really important components to the US system, and what this proposal essentially does is it's willing to sacrifice employer plans to help shore up social security, and I don't think that's very productive. But let me dive a little deeper. Social security is in a balance and, depending on your particular point of view, you could say taxes are too low or benefits are too high. But as an economist who very advanced math, all I can tell you is they don't add up right, they're not equal to each other. And so we can discuss how we got here and what happened, but the fact of the matter is going forward. Something unpleasant has to happen, and that's either we increase taxes on workers, we lower benefits that retirees get, or some combination of the two.
Speaker 1:And understandably, there's a great desire for a solver bullet, right? So people want to fix the system, but avoid pain, right? Because who wants to inflict pain on people? And I think this is an example of a supposedly painless solution because it raises revenue, and they basically say well, no one's hurt, because these plans don't work, they don't do anything, right? But, as we've already discussed. I think that's a false premise. The plans do work. In fact, by the time they hit retirement, most workers have accumulated something from these plans, and in retirement, most workers get a plan.
Speaker 3:And without a plan they don't save. That's the point that's being missed here. There's this argument I think that's implicit in the paper that people will save otherwise, and I think that's completely false based on the evidence.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'll give you the economist's view. So the reason that this is a debate is that theoretically we can't actually tell you whether increasing the returns to savings will increase savings or reduce it, and the reason is not to get too technical or go back to your undergrad econ. But there's a substitution effect and an income effect. So the substitution effect says future consumption is now cheaper, right, because the rate of return is higher, and so I'm willing to forego more consumption today, ie save to consume more later. So the substitution effect increases savings. But then there's an income effect which says now I'm wealthier over my lifetime and so that's going to cause me to consume more in retirement, but also more now because I'm wealthier, and so we can't sign what the effect is. And then if you go to the empirical work, it's mixed. Now they point to some work that I am not as convinced by. This is the Denmark study. Yeah, we can go into why, but it is, I mean.
Speaker 3:It's completely non-transmitable to the United States in my opinion, but that's my opinion.
Speaker 1:I mean there are differences. I discussed this paper once and said Denmark is, you know, just like, is very similar to Wisconsin, but less diverse. I'm sorry, because I went to school in Wisconsin. I was the yeah, very few people have brown hair. So in any event there are that, but it's more complex to that.
Speaker 1:So they do a series of things that they say this should have happened and then and it didn't. And in my mind they mischaracterize again some of the tax benefits. So one of the things they did is in the. So the typical system was like the US where you had a deduction, you know, for contributions in it's not included in income, not to either exclusion or reduction, and then they taxed it on the way out. But when they introduced defined contribution plans, right, they said, well, they expected everyone to just take out a lump sum, right, or force them to take out a lump sum and said, well, since you're taking out that big lump and we have very progressive tax system, we're going to tax you at a lower rate going out, right. So you had a top rate.
Speaker 1:I don't know the exact numbers, but let's just say the top rate was 60% marginal tax rate and the tax on the way out was a 40%. Well, that sets up an incentive to people that are near retirement. You just put it in and take it out the next day and you say tax money, all right, they got rid of that differential. And then they said, well, no one really reacted. Well, actually, some people reacted, and it's the people you would expect to react, which are people right near retirement, because for them it wasn't really savings, it was just a way to save on taxes. But the reason a lot of people didn't reduce their savings is it still was a very good deal because they went to the proper tax treatment, like real deferral. They just got rid of a windfall.
Speaker 1:But I don't want to go down to the weeds too much, just to say the data isn't consistent. But again, I do agree. I have a hard time thinking that. What I do know is right now, when you look at retirees, we have a fairly successful system, which is most, if you follow them from before they work into retirement, most replace a fairly high share of their income they had while working, and they do it through a combination of the two, and so it would be a very risky experiment to get rid of. The one thing that we know is working on the hope Exactly.
Speaker 3:And I think there's data that your colleague, jack van der Heij, who was at EBRY, now at Morningstar, has done work on that shows that moderate income workers who have a workplace savings program are 12 times more likely to save than on their own in an IRA. So the incentives are the same right. But the fact that you have that workplace program, the culture of savings, the match incentive, the payroll deduction, those mechanisms are critically important. And if you take away the incentives for the employer, particularly small business employers, to have a workplace plan, then they're just not going to do it and then those workers are empirically likely to be saving quite a bit less. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I think the way that the employer system has a lot of benefits, regular deduction from payroll, like we've designed a system, and what I mean we so essentially all the government really did is say, look, we allowed deferral and we don't care whether this is DBRDC and this is from the beginning of the tax code back in the 1910s and 20s. But basically all it says is like, if you're wage earner, we have this high marginal tax rates. You can take some of the money you have while you're working and shift it to years when you're not working and then we'll tax you. Then very simple system and from that without a whole lot of you know. You know we developed this system that is 401k, which has a lot of great features, which wasn't really necessarily part of the design. But you had employer contribution, employee contributions, you did it regularly, paycheck to paycheck, and has all these things.
Speaker 1:Auto-enrollment, yeah, and now I do think I'm not as convinced by the evidence of the IRA versus the employer plans, and the reason is is that it turns out Whether you have a plan at work or not. It is not random, so A lot of it has to do with who your co-workers are, so it's the composition of the workforce at where you work. That will determine whether it makes sense for the employer To go through all the expensive offering a plan, because the benefits have to be high enough, and so Most people that are really focused on saving will have an employer plan and the, and so we'll likely use that before they'd use an IRA. I Just I'm not saying that it doesn't increase savings, but it's not perhaps. Well, I think.
Speaker 3:I think you know you ought to take a look at, you know, what's happening in the states where they're requiring to have a plan and with the minimum being a payroll deduction IRA, because I do think that the incidents of more, you know, the marginal increases and savings are real and those people would not have saved even though they could have saved on their own, absent the employer based structure. So you know, I think you know, listen.
Speaker 1:With you that I think employer plans. I think an employer plays a huge role in the system and he's very important. But you know, I do think people do respond to the tax I'm a tax economist or, when you look at the data, people do respond to incentives and I think, yes, yeah.
Speaker 3:I think we'd both agree, I think is we're just. I think the employer system just makes it easier for for most, most workers to do it. And, to your point, this is a system that has created, you know, when we are over 11, close to 12 trillion dollars. I'm talking about the DC system and retirement savings, you know, immensely successful, based on the actual data. And this isn't, this is not the time to be throwing it all out and using that money to pay for Social Security, or just throwing it out all out for some other reason. And so, you know, look forward to your continued work, peter, thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I think I Mean. I write in my book that a tax deferral is a very Fair form of taxation, not unlimited tax deferral, which we don't have. There are limits to how much you can defer, but the ability for workers to what it does is the income. Income taxes Penalized savings. They reduce the incentive to save by taxing returns and by what these plans do is remove that, that Disincentive to say that's inherent in a tax. Turn tax income tax and Basically it allows workers to supplement Social Security and you have the system that I think has more support. You know the if we just had one or two of the components, maybe it wouldn't make sense, but went together. It's a progressive system. But taking away the ability of middle and upper middle income people to try to maintain their standard of living through these plans, I don't think would be helpful to the whole system.
Speaker 3:Completely agree. Why don't you plug your book? It's a podcast. You're supposed to do that.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I Don't make money off it because it's available free online on our website, but it's called how America Sports Retirement wrote a few years back and the idea behind it is Again, I didn't like the analysis that was done. It looked at a lot of these things in isolation and I try to look at the retirement system as a whole, inclusive of Social Security and retirement plans, and show how it works and it's also, and where can people find it online?
Speaker 1:So if you go to, I think it's ICIorg who benefits. Okay, there's a landing page and it's. I was actually surprised, you know. I knew it'd be a small audience in the US. People like yourself, a pension geek, might be interested, but it actually got translated into Chinese and Japanese that people like it.
Speaker 3:So awesome. Well, thank you again, peter, appreciate your time and look forward to your continued work to help defend the import based retirement plan system.
Speaker 1:Thanks again. Great to see you again, brian, and good luck you.