Over the past twenty-five years, Congress has enacted several major reforms for employer-sponsored retirement plans and individual retirement accounts (“IRAs”), always with large bipartisan, bicameral majorities. In each case, legislators have claimed that the reforms would improve retirement security for millions of Americans, especially rank-and-file workers. But the supposed interest in helping lower-income and middle-income earners has been a stalking horse for the real objective of expanding the tax subsidies available to higher-income earners. The legislation has repeatedly raised the statutory limits on contributions and benefits for retirement plans and IRAs, delayed the start of required distributions, and weakened statutory non-discrimination rules – all to the benefit of affluent workers and the financial-services companies that collect asset-based fees from retirement savings. The result has been spectacular growth in the retirement accounts of higher-income earners but modest or even negative growth in the accounts of middle-income and lower-income earners. Despite the benign but misleading rhetoric about enhancing retirement security for everyone, the real beneficiaries of the retirement-reform legislation have been higher-income earners, who would save for retirement even without tax subsidies, and the financial-services industry, whose lobbyists have driven the retirement-reform legislative agenda.
Citation
Michael Doran, The Great American Retirement Fraud, 30 Elder Law Journal, 265–347 (2023).
More in This Category
Over the past twenty-five years, Congress has enacted several major reforms for employer-sponsored retirement plans and individual retirement accounts...
More
Justin Hopkins
In an era characterized by inequalities of income and influence, political polarization, and the segregation of social spaces, the income tax...
More
Over the past quarter century, Congress has enacted several major reforms for retirement plans and individual retirement accounts, usually with large...
More
Michael S. Knoll
Law students frequently find the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dormant Commerce Clause doctrine confusing. That is no surprise given the sharp disagreement...
More
At the inception of a new and potentially transformative type of tax enforcement, this Article reviews the goals underlying the prohibition on state...
More
When Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck got engaged the first time, in 2002, he gave her a very pricey ring. That engagement ring was reportedly worth as...
More
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 provoked the imposition of economic sanctions that are unprecedented in their swiftness, severity, and novelty...
More
A division exists between scholars who claim that Congress made only limited delegations to executive officials in the early Republic, and those who...
More
Young Ran (Christine) Kim
By the end of the 20th century, international tax law was a dinosaur: outdated, outmoded, and inadequate at collecting and allocating the taxing...
More
Over the last thirty years, almost every time I stepped out of my narrow academic path to do something that, I hoped, was for the greater public good...
More
This essay, to be included as a chapter in a volume on corporate taxation, briefly reviews U.S. efforts to achieve corporate tax integration, focusing...
More
When Stanley Surrey—possibly the most prominent tax academic of the twentieth century—died in 1984, the school of thought sometimes known as the “new...
More
Yehonatan Givati
The Inflation Reduction Act signed by President Biden on August 16, 2022, allocated $80 billion in additional funding for the IRS. While Democrats...
More
Gregg D. Polsky
Section 1202 of the Internal Revenue Code grants a gain exclusion to certain shareholders who own "qualified small business stock." We describe the...
More
Robert Cooter
This comprehensive textbook applies economic analysis to public law. The economic analysis of law has revolutionized legal scholarship and teaching in...
More
In this article, Mason explains how the OECD's proposed Pillar 2 global minimum tax rules induce cooperation by states, and how the proposal to enact...
More
Michael Knoll
The district court erred when it concluded that because Proposition 12 applies only to in-state sales, it could not be extraterritorial. On the...
More
Commentators have made much sport, here and elsewhere, of evaluating recent proposed antitrust reforms for their likely economic effects. As...
More