“Senator Ben Cardin has been beyond instrumental in making our retirement system work the way it does today,” American Retirement Association (ARA) CEO Brian Graff said at the outset of a ceremony at the 2023 NAPA DC Fly-In Forum honoring the Maryland Democrat.
In May, Cardin announced that he would not seek reelection after 55 years as an elected official, saying at the time, “I have run my last election and will not be on the ballot in 2024, but there is still much work to be done.”
Graff recounted how the 1980s were a troubling time for retirement plan policy and legislation. Cardin (then a congressman) teamed with former Senator Rob Portman (also a congressman) to introduce new ideas to make a difference.
“It started what was multiple decades of work, beginning with the Small Business Job Protection Act in 1996, where he created such things as the Safe Harbor 401(k), the SIMPLE plan and really reversed all of the damage that previously occurred,” Graff said. “It brought us to the point today where we have an incredibly strong retirement system in this country with over $30 trillion in assets.”
For his decades of service to the retirement system and helping Americans save and reach a comfortable retirement, Graff presented Cardin with the NAPA Visionary Award.
“Brian was one of the key players in bringing together the Portman/Cardin process,” Cardin said when accepting the award. “It’s not two individuals, it was a process, and Brian helped us develop credibility among all the stakeholders to work together to get things done. We listened to each other. We compromised, and we surprised a lot of people.”
Noting that early on, there was no support from the Democrat or Republican leadership, they were able to move forward due to bipartisan organizations like the ARA. Portman and Cardin recognized a problem with the country’s economy; even though it was considered the strongest in the world, workers hadn’t saved enough, resulting in added pressure on Social Security.
“We didn’t have enough retirement security to protect us in the future, and we had to do something about it,” Cardin explained. “We convened a process with all the stakeholders to sit at the table as long as they were going to work constructively, and we were able to get some major, major bills done.”
Noting that if an employer provides a plan, employees are more likely to have retirement savings, they were able to expand the private system.
“We also worked to simplify it, particularly for smaller companies, making setting up a retirement system less costly. We recognized that for those that didn’t have an employer contribution, we needed to do something about that, and the Savers Credit was conceived and adopted. We then added predictability to the system. We wanted to ensure there was the easy ability to continue pension plans even though you change jobs, so we put that into a bill. Lastly, God bless Americans, we love them, but they make their decisions by inaction, so automatic enrollment was a game changer.”
Cardin concluded his remarks by mentioning lifetime income and the fact people are living longer.
“We were able to help people understand the advantages of getting started earlier,” he said, “We added catch-up contributions because we recognized, particularly for women, that many entered the workforce later. The results speak for themselves.”
