One of the many financial woes the United States of America faces because of decades of unregulated markets and the dismantling of workers’ rights is retirement savings. The median retirement savings of Americans in their forties is about $6,200. That’s not good. A small push under the Obama administration had been to spread automatic-enrollment retirement plans in small businesses. Auto-enrollment retirement plans are estimated to make workers 15 times more likely to save but are usually only affordable for very large businesses to sustain, leaving small business owners unable to offer such a service. Some states like California and Oregon passed laws which would support small businesses getting their workers into state-designed retirement savings plans. Obama “finalized a new regulation” last summer that would make sure that states involved in this kind of support would not have any legal federal obstacle. A couple of weeks ago Republicans decided to tell all of those economically anxious supporters that Republicans were going to figure out new and special ways to tell them to go fuck themselves. Wednesday night, Senate Republicans finalized that sentiment.
The rollback is expected have a chilling effect on the plans already underway in seven states, but won't necessarily halt them. California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington have already adopted legislation to create new savings programs, while lawmakers in at least a dozen other states are considering similar plans.
But the repeal will undermine the previous administration's efforts that encouraged states to create new ways to address the national retirement savings crisis.
Wednesday night, Republicans went to work and proudly yelled “Go fuck yourselves.” Utah’s old shitbag of a lying hypocrite Senator Orin Hatch spoke on the Senate floor and spewed this bullshit line:
"I can only wonder why states think they will be able to produce better results than the private retirement savings system, which has been an unqualified success.”
By “unqualified success,” I’m guessing he means that his and his friends’ savings accounts are nice and running over.