Rob Andrews: “I would urge our colleagues to support this well-reasoned and well-thought-out Democratic substitute. It differs in many…”

“I would urge our colleagues to support this well-reasoned and well-thought-out Democratic substitute. It differs in many ways, and it is an improvement in many ways from the underlying bill. I would like to highlight a few of those improvements, first in the area of investment advice. This substitute does provide for investment advice for workers and pensioners, but it clearly favors independent investment advice. It provides that workers and pensioners will receive advice from qualified individuals who do not have an interest in the outcome of the advice that they are giving. Second, this substitute, unlike the underlying bill, deals with the problem of cash balance plans. Cash balance plans, which I believe have been improperly used in many cases, have become a nightmare for pensioners, where people who thought that they had a guaranteed income at a set level for the rest of their lives have confronted the nightmare scenario where they, in fact, have much less, sometimes as much as 50 percent less than they thought they had in their pensions. This substitute contains a very simple provision that empowers each employee to choose between conversion of his or her pension to a cash balance plan or retention of his or her pension in its more traditional form. This bill puts a stop to the secret transactions involving executive pension compensation and pension provisions.”