[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 19]
[House]
[Pages 25347-25351]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    AMERICAN WORKERS PENSION SYSTEM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2005, the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, millions of Americans 
are worried sick about their retirement nest eggs, and they are 
demanding decisive action by Congress. In just the last 2 weeks, two 
national publications have featured cover stories on the peril 
America's workers and retirees are facing.
  On October 31 of this year, the issue of Time magazine has a stinging 
anthology of missteps and foibles of the Congress in the regulation of 
private pension plans. The cover story that is pictured here on this 
cover of Time magazine, called, ``The Great Retirement Rip-off--
Millions of Americans who think they will retire with benefits are in 
for a nasty surprise--how corporations are picking people's pockets--
with the help of Congress.''
  That is the status of the American workers' pension system today. It 
is a system that is in peril, and it continues to be in peril because 
of the lack of action by this Congress.
  For 3 years, we have been warning the President and this Congress 
that we must take decisive action to strengthen unfunded pension plans. 
Back in July of 2002, I wrote Secretary

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O'Neill and Secretary Chao, urging them to take action after private 
pension underfunding quadrupled $25 billion to $111 billion.
  I wrote to them that ``The implications of such massive shortfall in 
pension funds are staggering, for pensioners, taxpayers and for private 
companies themselves. As part of your agency's statutory duties, as 
overseers of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, it is incumbent 
upon you,'' Mr. and Mrs. Secretary, ``to ensure that private pension 
plans continue to be properly and adequately funded, and that the 
economic security of employees and taxpayers is no further 
endangered.''
  What do you think happened since I wrote that letter back in July of 
2002? Private pension plans' underfunding has quadrupled again to 
nearly $450 billion. The pension plans of hard-working men and women in 
this country, the pension plans that they are basing their retirement 
plans on, the pension plans that they are relying on for the future 
care of their spouses and other members of their family are underfunded 
by $450 billion.
  The deficit at the PBGC, the agency that is supposed to guarantee 
these pensions should these companies go out of business, should these 
pensions be put into default, they are, in fact, now at greater risk of 
having to pay out billions of dollars to make up the shortfall. In 
fact, they are at risk of whether or not the PBGC can continue, given 
the amount of shortfall that exists in America's pension plans.
  Since we wrote the Secretaries back then and since the quadrupling of 
the underfunding, hundreds of thousands of employees at U.S. Airways 
and United have lost billions of dollars in promised benefits. What has 
this Congress done about this? Absolutely nothing.
  It took years for the Bush administration to get a reform plan up to 
the Congress, and it has not lifted a finger to push for the passage of 
that plan. Where is the leadership on behalf of America's working 
families? Where is the sense of urgency to protect billions of dollars 
in promised retirement benefits that are now threatened?
  After years of costly delay, finally the House and Senate committees 
have passed legislation out of committee, but there is an ugly truth 
about the bills that many of you do not know about. When the Members of 
Congress voted on these bills, they were not given the facts about what 
these bills really do: What is the impact of these bills on the Pension 
Benefit Guaranty Corporation; what is the impact on the companies who 
we were raising the premiums for; what is the impact on the taxpayers; 
and what is the impact on America's workers and their retirement plans.
  When we voted on one of these so-called pension bills last spring, 
the committee Democrats voted ``present'' because we had no information 
on the legislation's impact. A few weeks ago, several weeks after the 
committee voted, we asked the PBGC and CBO what, in fact, are the real 
impacts? What they have told us is that it has made the situation 
worse, that the bill that was passed in the committee actually hastens 
the pension crisis.
  Here is what the Congressional Budget Office wrote us in October of 
this year: ``H.R. 2830,'' the pension bill, ``would increase PBGC's 10-
year net costs by $9 billion, or about 14 percent, compared with what 
it would be under current policy.'' So we made the problem for the 
guaranty corporation worse with this bill.
  The PBGC, that guaranty corporation, also analyzed itself, and it 
said that using a model that contains the hundreds of plans found in 
the guaranty corporation, the committee-passed bill would add billions 
more to the PBGC's deficit than under current law.
  Not only does this bill make the problems worse with respect to 
underfunding, it also fails in many other respects. Most significantly, 
the bill does not stop companies like United Airlines from dumping 
billions of unwanted pension debt onto the guaranty corporation.
  Delta and Northwest now have watched this Congress, they have watched 
United; and I believe that we can expect that they will follow suit, 
and we will end up with those pensions. They watched United dump $10 
billion onto the public taxpayers, and the Congress did not lift a 
finger. Now Delta and Northwest are in bankruptcy and very well could 
dump their pensions into the guaranty corporation and onto the backs of 
the taxpayers.
  According to the guaranty corporation, Delta Airlines is underfunded 
by $10.6 billion. The PBGC loss would be about $8.4 billion and the 
employees and retirees would lose $2.2 billion in promised benefits.

                              {time}  1630

  Northwest Airlines is $5.7 billion underfunded, and the employee loss 
would even be greater there. Those employees would lose about $2.9 
billion in pension benefits that they have planned on, that they are 
expecting, and that they have built their retirement on. And now, more 
dominoes may be falling. Delphi Auto Parts has filed for bankruptcy, 
the largest such filing in the history of the automobile industry. 
According to the PBGC, the Delphi claim on the taxpayer-funded 
corporation would be about $4.1 billion. The hit on employees, over $10 
billion in uninsured losses would be the largest ever. That tops the $6 
billion in worker losses that the PBGC estimated occurred over its four 
previous largest pension plan terminations.
  What does this all add up to? This all adds up to the fact that there 
is bad news for American workers who are relying on their employer to 
help them provide for their pension plans, for their retirements. We 
see this story in Time magazine, the cover story telling us how 
Americans are in for a very nasty surprise when it comes time to retire 
in the next few years for many of the baby boomers. Then we see a week 
later in The New York Times magazine: ``We Regret to Inform You That 
You No Longer Have a Pension.''
  That is the message that is being sent to millions of Americans, 
millions of Americans who in many instances have no way to recover 
those resources for their retirement because of their age. They are 50, 
they are 55, they are 60 years old. They have no way to recover this. 
They could not work enough overtime. They could not work enough 
Saturdays and Sundays. They could not work enough holidays to get that 
pension back.
  What is the Congress doing? The Congress is doing nothing. In fact, 
the tragedy of the Time magazine story is that it shows that Congress 
has been a handmaiden in allowing corporations to game the system, 
allowing corporations to use the pension plan for the convenience, the 
profit, and the personal rewards of board members, shareholders, and 
the CEOs of the company. They all use the pension plan and manipulate 
the pension plan for their benefit. But the workers are left out of 
that equation.
  Even this morning, in The New York Times, we are told that the 
Accounting Standards Board is now looking at taking action because of 
this manipulation of workers' pensions. They talk about how, I believe 
it was the Lucent Corporation, where the CEO was given a $4 million 
bonus for doing such a great job, on top of a $1.5 million salary, and 
then was given another bonus because the profits of the corporation 
were up and the revenues were up. The only problem was that the CEO had 
been in the process of manipulating the pension plan to make it look 
like the profits of Lucent were up.
  Of course, the story of Lucent is well-known. The profits were 
phantom. They were not there, and they have tumbled. That same CEO has 
now been fired, probably given a severance package, but nobody said a 
word while they were manipulating the pension plan.
  So this goes on every day and the Congress stands by and does 
nothing. They do nothing to ensure that Americans will have a say in 
their pension plans. Imagine this, this company had $10 billion, $12 
billion of workers' money, their retirement; yet those workers had no 
say in how that company would use that pension plan. That is not just 
Lucent; that is true of almost every other pension plan in this 
country. That is what we saw with

[[Page 25349]]

Enron. That is what we see with Lucent. That is what we see with 
company after company that uses the plan for the convenience of the 
company to mislead shareholders, to mislead investors, and to mislead 
Wall Street.
  Hopefully, hopefully in the next few weeks, the Accounting Standards 
Board will step up to the plate here and hit one out for the American 
public and give the American public some say in the money that they 
have earned, people who have earned these pensions over 15 years, over 
20 years; these people who gave up salary so they would have a better 
retirement plan. They gave up health care so they would have a better 
retirement plan. They produced this pension plan, and now it is treated 
as if it is only the personal property of the executive board of the 
company, the corporation, and the personal property of the CEO. And if 
things go bad, they run to the taxpayers to bail them out, but the 
workers lose over half of all of their pensions. That is what happened 
to the people at United Airlines. That is what is going to happen to 
the people at Delphi, and that is what is going to happen to so many 
pensioners.
  Now, we could not get the Republican Congress to hold a hearing on 
this problem to take a look at United Airlines, so we had to resort to 
an e-hearing. We had to go out on the Internet and ask the employees of 
United to tell us what this meant to them, and we got thousands of 
responses from people, thousands of responses from people about what 
this pension meant to their life.
  Among those thousands of responses, and among millions of so many 
people in this country, were people telling us about their pensions and 
the importance of their pensions to take care of a spouse who had 
serious illnesses, who had disabilities; to take care of a child who 
was disabled; to take care of a child who had a serious illness, and 
now they were going to lose that ability because United was cutting 
their pensions in half, and the PBGC Board would not be able to take 
care of them. So very often these people talked about their plans for 
their retirement that simply evaporated the day United callously threw 
their plans into bankruptcy.
  One of the letters we see was from a spouse of a captain at United. 
She wrote: ``Dear Congressman Miller, my name is Ellen Saracini. My 
husband, Captain Victor J. Saracini, was the captain of United Flight 
175 that struck the south tower of the World Trade Center on September 
11, 2001, at 9:03 a.m. While no one could have imagined the events of 
that infamous day, neither could Victor have imagined what would be 
happening to his wife and two daughters.
  ``I am writing this letter to voice to you what has been taken away 
from Victor and his family. If you only knew my husband, you would know 
he was a true family man, who made sure his family's future was 
provided for. I am currently receiving the spousal portion of Victor's 
pension, which is 50 percent of what he thought would be there for his 
family. After United took away our employee stock ownership plan, this 
pension is how I am supporting my two daughters and myself.
  ``I was given a choice to sue the airlines, the port authority, and 
others, or join in with the victims compensation fund set up by the 
government. I pledged I would not sue and proceeded with the fund. 
After all, this is the company Victor was so proud to work for and the 
same company of his United brothers and sisters. Every bit of 
preparation that Victor and I worked for was used against the claim. 
Life insurance was deducted. My full pension was deducted from the 
award. Now I will have a double jeopardy, as I will again lose my 
pension with no recourse on either side.
  ``I can't help but ask myself, at what point are companies allowed to 
take away so much from the lives of dedicated employees and their 
families? At what point does our government step in and stop the 
atrocities such as this before they are allowed to irrevocably change 
the lives of so many? I refuse to believe that this is the only 
solution that can be reached.
  ``The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation's decision to allow United 
Airlines to end their pension is just wrong. If this monumental verdict 
moves forward, I will be faced with many hardships. Victor was a proud 
United pilot, husband, father, and friend, who fought a war with 
terrorists. Never would he have imagined that he would have to fight 
for his family's well-being with the very company he so proudly spread 
his wings for. Sincerely, Ellen Saracini.''
  That letter echoes what we heard from so many across the country 
about their plans being shattered, about their ability to care for 
members of their family being shattered. And, of course, we understand 
that so many others would like to tell their stories, but there is no 
vehicle in the Congress of the United States for doing that.
  One of my colleagues on the Education and Workforce Committee, 
Congressman Tierney, I see has joined us from Boston; and I would like 
at this point to yield to him. He has been a stalwart in this effort to 
try to hold the Congress accountable, to try to hold the Pension 
Benefit Guaranty Corporation accountable, and most importantly to try 
and hold corporations to be accountable and stop this criminal activity 
of the manipulation of the pension plans of their employees, the same 
manipulation, the same activities that are outlined in the cover story 
of Time magazine of October 31 of this year and then again in The New 
York Times magazine of October 30 of this year. And today, if you want 
to be current on it, you can read The New York Times business page 
about the continued manipulation of the pension plans for the benefit 
of everybody except the retirees.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.
  Mr. TIERNEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend and colleague from 
California (Mr. George Miller) for yielding to me. As you say, reading 
those articles is just shocking, but it is nothing new to us.
  For a couple of years now, we have been following my colleague's lead 
as Democrats on the Education and Workforce Committee trying to get the 
Republicans in this body to understand the need to confront what is 
nothing short of a crisis. Millions of Americans are in retirement, or 
they are nearing retirement; and all they are experiencing now is 
either decreasing health benefits or decreasing pension benefits, and 
the total loss of one or the other in many instances. It is not fair, 
it is not right, and in fact it is not sound policy for this country.
  For the past century, we have really had a history of gradually 
improving people's quality of life. Go back to 1938, when Franklin 
Delano Roosevelt said: ``There is still today a frontier that remains 
unconquered, an America unclaimed. That is the great nationwide 
frontier of insecurity, of human want and fear. This is the frontier, 
the America we have set ourselves to reclaim.''
  At the time that he said that, a majority of aging citizens were 
faced with either working until they dropped or living in poverty as 
they got older or as ill health set in. But Franklin Delano Roosevelt 
and his thirst set about doing something about it: Social Security. 
Eisenhower later on added disability to that, and the Johnson years saw 
Medicare and Medicaid. All along the way, corporate America actually 
helped, with Jacob Hacker constructing what they called ``structures of 
security.'' They guaranteed pensions, generous health care benefits, 
and generous life insurance.
  So we had all of America working together. This was an effort where 
together America did better. We were protected from what FDR called 
``the hazards and vicissitudes of modern industrial life.'' Together, 
we shielded families and we covered them from uncertainty and fear.
  Now that is all settling back in. If you look around and talk to any 
family, as my colleague has done, talk to families and again that 
uncertainty and that fear of the future is there for them. Corporate 
America no longer seems to want to participate. They are taking away 
health benefits; they are taking away pensions. They do not

[[Page 25350]]

want to honor the pensions. And my colleague and I both know that 
people worked for those pensions. It was not something that was just 
given to them. They gave up extra salary on the promise that the 
company would set aside that money to build a pension fund or a health 
care fund for their retirement, for the future. They earned those 
benefits. They struck a bargain, and now that bargain is being broken.
  We are watching as company after company cut back on health benefits, 
jettison pension obligations, and usually through the side door of 
bankruptcy. The gentleman mentioned what happened with United. They are 
not just going to toss them out. They go into a bankruptcy court, and 
they convince the court that they have to cut loose on those pension 
funds in order to regroup and come back out of bankruptcy at some point 
as a healthy company.
  But the CEOs do not get hurt. The CEOs and other management people 
walk out with golden parachutes worth millions of dollars, leaving very 
little for the people that put their blood and sweat into building that 
company in the first place and building the value of that stock. We 
hear the obligatory regrets, we see the handwringing, and we are told 
there was nothing else to be done.
  But we know that is not the case. Most did not exhaust all the 
avenues to finance a continuation of those pension funds, and my 
colleague pointed out a number of occasions like that. Most of these 
companies did not even work with the Pension Benefit Guaranty 
Corporation to look at the numerous number of financial vehicles that 
are out there that could have been used or at least considered to try 
to keep these plans healthy so that all these employees could have 
gotten more than they got when they were brought up at the bankruptcy 
and ignominiously dropped off and dumped.
  Shareholders, new shareholders and new owners come out of bankruptcy 
and find a profitable company and make millions. But people who lost 
their pensions end up on the short end of it and their livelihoods are 
getting killed in this process. Companies did not honor their promises. 
They did not set enough funds aside. They used tricky accounting, 
unscrupulously applied by management, management obviously more 
involved with the bottom line and sometimes their own benefits and 
their own retirement programs than they were with the human needs of 
all those people that worked so hard to make that company successful.
  Whole industries are now parroting what United did. We are watching 
the airline industry one after the other marching into the bankruptcy 
courts and saying, hey, this is not so bad. We can dump off our 
obligation and hurt all these employees, but we might save the company 
against other creditors. Under this Republican leadership in Congress, 
we have done nothing about that. We really have not looked at it and 
have not tried to deal with this problem. We have done way too little.
  We have done a little. After 2 years of badgering from the Democratic 
side of the aisle, we are looking to try to shore up that Pension 
Benefit Guaranty Corporation, increasing the fees somewhat, making it 
more expensive to withdraw. But it is late, and it may or may not be 
all we need to do to make sure that that works. We have to tighten the 
rules to make sure we have the proper valuing system going on and to 
discourage people from dumping the funds.
  We also have to set some parity. Maybe the surest way to make sure 
people get treated fairly is a bill my colleague has proposed to make 
sure that CEOs and other executives do not get treated much, much 
better than the employees; that they do not get to dump the employees 
off while saving themselves. If we had parity, where what is good for 
the goose is good for the gander, we would not be watching that happen.
  We have to create more transparency. This is anther issue we have 
brought up time and time again. We ought to know ahead of time what the 
true status of these funds is. It is not enough to, well, say we cannot 
tell the public because sometimes on paper it looks worse than it is 
and they will panic. We are talking about adults here. We are talking 
about people trying to plan their future. And if we let them know what 
state that pension is in early enough in time, we can get the company 
and apply enough pressure to maybe correct that situation. That is good 
for all stakeholders, employees, shareholders, customers, and everybody 
right down the line.
  We should require that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation and 
companies try to work these things out before they go to bankruptcy. It 
ought to be a requirement that they use every single measure available 
and consider all alternatives and only go in as a last resort.

                              {time}  1645

  And we had better find a way to protect workers' pensions if they do 
go into bankruptcy. What is the explanation why people who have 
invested over the course of 15, 20, 30 years of work do not have their 
rights protected as a creditor, yet someone who might have given a loan 
to the company in the last 6 months gets credited as a preferred 
creditor and gets supported.
  Whose rights are more important and who has a better claim to the 
assets of that company than the employees who made it what it is?
  Finally, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation was not designed to 
have whole industries fall apart. It was designed that if an occasional 
company went under, it would be able to shore up and at least give 
those employees some portion of their retirement benefits so they would 
not lose everything. But now what we are seeing is other people 
following the lead of United, whether it is Delphi, United, other 
airlines, we stand the prospect of having whole industries jumping on 
the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation as an insurer and they are 
totally underfunded for that kind of a situation.
  We need to look at that and say, is there something that we should 
set up, another source of funds, whether it is a ticket fee or 
something else, something that we can set aside so that industry going 
down does not take on the whole Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation 
and all corporations and put all those employees at risk.
  More broadly, I think we need some leadership here in Congress on 
this issue. If corporations are not going to do anything about it, what 
are we going to do? What are we going to put in place for structures of 
security for the American people? What is our plan to make sure that 
something is there for people?
  People do not save enough. History shows us that. If corporations are 
going to take their money over a number of years and not hold their 
promise, what are we going to do as a society to make sure there is 
some security for people when they retire and can no longer work 
because of their age or because of their health?
  We need 21st century structures of security here. Democrats have been 
talking about this. We want to do something about it. We have ideas and 
we are open to a lot of other ideas. We cannot get the conversation 
started. We are going to keep at it.
  Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman points 
out that this raid is taking place on pensions. The President, in the 
middle of the Enron debacle said what is good from the captain is good 
for the crew, and then we have heard nothing from the President again. 
The President has done nothing to shore up the existing system that is 
under threat. And in the middle of that, what does the President do? He 
attacks the Social Security plan, which is the single largest source of 
pension benefits for these very same people.
  So while he lets the corporations dump pension benefits into 
bankruptcy, lets corporations dump them into the Pension Benefit 
Guaranty Corporation, which costs the pensioners billions and billions 
in dollars of pension benefits, then at the same time he conducts a 
raid on Social Security by trying to create some private accounts that 
adds trillions of dollars in new debt to Social Security.
  So now what you have is the poor American worker, whether it is their

[[Page 25351]]

private savings, whether it is their employer pension plan or Social 
Security, it is all under threat. It is all under threat. The tragedy 
is that, given what is going on in the private sector with the 
manipulation of pension plans, with the uncertainty about the future of 
pension plans, with corporations fully prepared to just throw them into 
bankruptcy, Social Security is emerging as the most secure retirement 
system in the Nation. There is not a single corporation, not Delphi, 
not General Motors, not AT&T, not Lucent, not Kodak, not Microsoft, 
that can look you in the eye and tell you, 75 years from now 85 percent 
of your benefits will be there and they will be there like clockwork. 
Social Security can, and that is the one they have targeted for 
extinction.
  Their proposal is to leave the worker in this country, the employee 
who has struggled for the success of the companies that they work for, 
to leave them with nowhere to turn. All you have to do is just go out 
into any public gathering and you will start to get feedback from 
people who are telling you about how nervous they are about their 
retirement benefits and how much they have counted on them, and now 
they do not know if they are going to be there or not. They are 
uncertain and they have no ability to plan.
  We have a plan, and that plan is, just as we did with employer and 
employee contributions to pension plans, just as we did to employer and 
employee contributions to Social Security, the idea is if we work 
together as a society, we can bond together and provide these resources 
so people will have decent retirements.
  Because we went through many generations in this country where 
people's retirement was only about poverty. But because of Social 
Security, because of Medicare, we have lifted millions and millions of 
Americans out of poverty to have a decent retirement plan. They have 
contributed with their personal savings and their employers have 
contributed with their employee pension plans. Now all of that appears 
to be at risk.
  This Congress must step in and start to deal with this problem 
because the economic livelihood of millions of American families and 
individuals is at stake here and the system we have now was designed 
when few companies went out of business.
  Today, these companies understand that you simply take all of your 
liabilities, you dump them on the taxpayer, and this is what Bethlehem 
Steel did, you get rid of those liabilities, and then the company 
continues on. We absorbed billions of dollars in liability from the 
steelworkers. Mr. Ross got all of the steel companies together, and 
then he sold them to Mitel, the Indian steel company, and they are off 
and running as part of one of the largest steel companies in the world. 
Thank you, American taxpayer, and thank you the steelworkers who lost a 
big chunk of their pension plans. They subsidized that activity.
  Mr. Speaker, that cannot be allowed to continue. I thank the 
gentleman for joining me here today.
  Mr. TIERNEY. Mr. Speaker, there are simple things that we should do 
just to get started. If we change the default on 401(k) plans so they 
default into them as opposed to they have to take an affirmative action 
in order to sign up for them, all of the reports show that would 
increase savings in this country or at least put a hedge on that.
  If we allowed people to bifurcate their tax returns, so instead of 
one check sent back or put towards next year's taxes, workers could 
actually have some set aside for a 401(k), reports show it would 
increase savings.
  We cannot get our colleagues on the other side of the aisle to join 
us in doing a simple first step. This is a serious matter. They talk 
about the ownership policy of the President. But basically it is every 
man, woman and child for themselves. They are not going to tax the 
estates of dead people, not going to tax dividends, but are going to 
tax every ounce of work that causes sweat on your brow, not have 
companies live up to their promises with respect to your pensions, let 
companies take away the health care that they promised when you retire.
  Mr. Speaker, as a government, we are about much, much more. This is a 
country that has always had a mixed economy. This is a country that has 
always relied on having a free market and that was always invigorated 
by a rigorous public square, public policy that worked for everybody; 
and corporations and individuals and government leaders worked together 
to find solutions.
  We are ready to do that. If the other side does not want to do that, 
then step aside and let us go because this is a serious matter for 
families across the country. They are rightfully worried about this.
  Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. The fact of the matter is, as 
pointed out in these articles, people no longer having pensions or 
people being in for a nasty surprise, the fact of the matter is, for 5 
years the Bush administration, the Republican Congress, have simply 
stood back as the American middle class standard of living for retirees 
is dismantled, it is threatened, is devastated, however Members want to 
describe it. That is what they have done.
  They have suggested this is okay because you can ask Secretary Chao 
until the cows come home anything about it, she cannot answer a single 
question, expresses no concern, could provide no information about the 
pension bill. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation refused to 
provide us the information before we voted. After we voted, they said, 
You made the problem worse. And from the Congressional Budget Office, 
You made the problem worse.
  So I guess that the policy of the Republican Congress and the Bush 
administration is that millions of Americans will lose their hold on 
the middle class the moment they retire. The moment they retire, they 
will lose their hold.
  We have tried to encourage a younger generation to save, to provide 
for their retirement. We cannot get a hearing on things that would 
dramatically change, if not these retirees' livelihoods, it would 
certainly change the livelihood for younger workers in this country. It 
is a sad day that we do not do this.
  Tragically, there are going to be millions more cover stories like 
this as millions of Americans lose access to the retirement they were 
planning for for the care of themselves, their families, and their 
children.

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