Some believe little in the way of public policy should be done to help future retirees. Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute, though he agrees part of the problem is systemic, also feels a significant share of the blame falls on individuals who inadequately save for retirement: “People are adults. We’re not dummies here. If somebody over the course of their lifetime consciously makes dumb decisions, it’s a little hard to stop that so long as we’re living in a free society.”

Is there really nothing we can do to help those who will have inadequate resources in retirement? “Work an extra year or two,” Biggs said. “Working longer is a really effective way of raising replacement rates.” What about those who are unable to keep working? He said the majority of jobs today are less physically demanding than they were in the past, when the average retirement age was higher. “Are there people with physically demanding jobs? Sure there are. Are they the majority of people? Should we base our whole national policy on that? Probably not.”

And what about those who were unable to save for retirement or lost their savings? “Undeniably there are going to be some people who are in a bad situation. We’ve got a crappy economy…Would I prefer that we didn’t have a crushing recession and these guys didn’t have to work longer? Sure. But that’s the price we pay for making [poor] policy, which we did,” said Biggs.

To some, such as Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Americans should not be forced to “pay the price” for poor policy made in Washington. “We ended up in this situation because we had an economic collapse. These people [future retirees] didn’t collapse the economy…And then you turn around to these people and go, ‘Well, you’re just going to have to live within your means?’” Baker said.

We asked Biggs about this point, and he replied, “Well sure, but we live in a world where, when Washington makes bad policy, we all bear the cost of it. That’s just how it is. I don’t want to sound heartless on this stuff, but there’s just no way around that.”

Baker disagreed with that view. “Well, I for one am certainly not resigned to that. Certainly you could talk about increasing benefits for the low and middle end, and that’s not terribly expensive…You’re talking about money, but this isn’t some impossible burden,” he said.

Biggs supported the idea of automatic enrollment in 401(k) retirement savings plans for employees, but aside from that, argued that most forms of government intervention would likely be bad policy: “If you could readily identify the people who are not well-prepared for retirement through no fault of their own, and figure out the degree to which they need assistance, then we can talk and see how big a policy change we’re looking at. But I just don’t see [that] people can do that very well at this point…I just don’t trust the political process to really get these things right.”