Here’s today’s “Slap in the Face” Award, and it affects all of us.

It goes out to the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Commission on Retirement Security and Personal Savings.

[ad#Google Adsense 336×280-IA]In 2014, the commission was established to make recommendations aimed at fixing Social Security and offering solutions to the retirement funding crisis.

And its latest report includes all of the usual numbers, statistics and issues that you’ve heard before. For example, half of private-sector employees do not participate in any type of retirement plan.

But the Commission’s recommendations to fix this problem would only address a third of those not covered and totally overlooks folks who work for very small companies.

It suggests requiring employers (with 50 or more employees) to automatically enroll employees in a 401(k) or defined benefit plan, enhanced myRA, or a new “Retirement Security Plan.”

But it offers no ideas about how to fund them.

What we really need is a retirement system with an automatic, minimum required contribution – not more types of accounts.

It also recommended that homeowners consider using the equity in their homes to help fund their retirements. This would be a reverse mortgage. It’s not a terrible idea, especially if you don’t have a mortgage on your primary residence.

It also offered up a few other ideas, but they would just create more options, not solutions.

So it’s not much help, really. But here comes the biggie!

This commission, headed by a “well-respected former high-level Senate staffer,” recommends cutting benefits… the Social Security benefits you rely on. This should not be news to you.

But the problem isn’t just the cuts. It’s the size of them – and who they’re designed to impact.

The commission recommends substantial cuts should come from what this group of Washington insiders defines as the two highest quintiles of wage earners. That’s the top 40% of earners.

I hope you’re sitting down because the income levels these insiders consider “the top” are the fourth quintile, $68,213 to $112,261, and the top quintile, $112,262 and up.

Yup, these folks inside the Beltway want to make big cuts in benefits to people making over $68,000 and change. And this is their primary solution for the retirement funding crisis.

I swear I am not making up one word of this.

Are the bureaucrats and elected officials inside the Beltway really that out of touch with what’s going on in this country?

Really? Taxpayers making as little as $68,000 and change have to bear the brunt of correcting what Washington has allowed to become a “runaway default train”?

Well, it’s time to get your paper and pens out, folks. Start writing to your congressmen and senators to stop this now.

Every week the mess (that is our retirement system) gets worse and worse.

And – to answer my critics in advance – yes, I do have some solid, workable ideas to fix this mess. But that’s for next week’s Two-Minute Retirement Solution. See you there.

Good investing,

Steve

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Source: Wealthy Retirement