401(k) Policy: Trump vs. Biden Administration

[0:00] JD: Ready to rock, Brandon. [0:01] John Sullivan: One and only. One and only. One and only with the one and only. The one and only. The one and only. The one and only One and only Johnson. Brutal. [0:12] JD: Welcome, welcome, welcome to another episode of Retireholics Sheltering in place. We are here with our special guest, the one and only. Fantastically fantastic John Sullivan. Thanks for being here, buddy. [0:30] John Sullivan: Thanks, man. That intro, I think it's going to give me an epileptic seizure at this point. I mean, it's just your face. [0:37] JD: Well, let's dive right into this. You and I'm going to put this all on you. Mr. Sullivan, you said that you maybe wanted to talk about Trump versus Biden in a bit of a 401k slant. So why don't I put all the pressure on you? Lay that out for me. What the hell do you want to talk about here? [0:55] John Sullivan: No, we can talk about what they're doing. I mean, you know, Biden specifically has his Biden plan for older Americans, something that he certainly knows something about, that's for sure. So, you know, it's up on his website. There's not a whole lot of detail there, as you might expect in the campaign. He doesn't want to get nailed down on anything, but he definitely acknowledges that 401ks and IRAs are instrumental to the retirement security for older Americans. But he takes issue with the fact that most of the tax benefits and tax incentives built into the structure of the plans goes to the top 20% of income earners. And so he wants to bring that down market, so to speak, to middle income and lower income workers. How he's going to do that again, it doesn't go into a whole lot of detail, but that's really his angle. It's more of a almost an income inequality play, but it's a retirement income inequality play. [1:47] JD: I'm surprised that he knows what a 401k is because on a on Sunday he posted this. So Merry Christmas. I don't know. I got that from kush mcush mcush45 on Instagram. That's mean Trump, by the way. I've always said with Trump, from the day one, he likes to take, take applause for the stock market. Like he is the guy that has made the stock market do so well. And I've always shook my head going man, as a financial guy, like what happens when the stock market corrects itself? Then everyone's gonna be blaming you for that. That's kind of a bad move from the get go, right? [2:28] John Sullivan: Well, when it comes to 409ks he seems to take the detect nothing, nobody. [2:36] JD: I'm laughing. [2:37] John Sullivan: All right, I gotcha. So, yeah, I mean, look, that's his proxy for identifying with the Everyman. You know, how's your 401k doing? He takes a lot of credit for it, which we haven't been hearing a lot about. I wonder why. So you kind of live by the sword, you die by the sword when it comes to 401 s in the economy. And so I think that at this point, though, he has really, with the executive order broadening, MEPs and PEPs and all of that, the coverage aspect, I think that we've seen all we're going to see from a retirement kind of initiative for the Trump administration at this point, I don't think there's going to be a whole lot. If there is a second Trump administration further with this, I think that he's done everything that he's going to do. One thing that I will say, though, getting back to Biden, I think that you're going to see a rise again of the notion of GRAs government retirement accounts first floated by Teresa Gillard Ducci was something that in our industry, I think got a lot of, you know, we disparaged within the industry itself. But I don't think that we realize just how much play they got outside of our industry. I mean, you have Tony James, who was, who developed the whole concept of guaranteed retirement accounts with Gillard Duchy, and he's the CEO of Blackstone, the private equity group. He was on the short list for Treasury Secretary had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election. So he's definitely going to be a player in a potential Biden administration. I think you're going to start to see some kind of mandatory savings program requirement initiative be raised again. And so that's definitely a threat to the 401k that we should be watching as we move forward here. [4:20] JD: John, you've clearly never watched this show before. We don't really provide that much value. [4:27] John Sullivan: You're way smarter than you look. [4:28] JD: But I appreciate it. It's funny you said that. [4:31] John Sullivan: Boring everybody is. [4:32] Justin: What? [4:32] JD: No, no, it's phenomenal. You're bringing value. It's funny that you mentioned that because I was going to say that if I could make Trump be a certain type of 401k plan or a plan and Biden be one, I was going to say Trump would be a cash balance plan and Biden would be the state run Cal Savers plan and kind of backed me up there. By the way, Mr. Trump is really good with his financial literacy. Because I've got a tweet here. On my other screen, he tweeted stock market at all time high. This was obviously a while ago. [5:02] John Sullivan: Right. [5:03] JD: How are, how are your 401ks doing? 70%, 80%, 90% up? Only 50% up. What are you doing wrong? Yeah, that's Trump, man. [5:13] John Sullivan: The best is when he was giving marriage advice and saying, you know, that, you know, back during the Obama administration that wives were not honoring their husband and they just thought that they were just pieces of crap. And, you know, now they're saying, oh my God, honey, you're a genius. A financial genius. And he's helping with supposed marriage therapy. I thought that was. That took some guts, I guess is the best way to put it. [5:37] Justin: I don't think that has anything to do with it. Right. He's willing to say anything. It doesn't require guts to come out [5:43] John Sullivan: in a [5:46] Justin: 50 point tweet. [5:47] John Sullivan: Yeah, you're right. [5:49] JD: In all seriousness, no, he is a. The stock market is very important to him. Right. And so he, as a president, if the question is who's better for 401ks, is it Biden or Trump? I mean, you could make the argument that it's Trump because he's obsessed with financial markets and making sure he can do whatever he can to boost them up. Right? [6:10] John Sullivan: Yeah. And we did an analysis, actually a piece a while back. I can get the link to anybody who wants it, but that's exactly, you know, we took a look at each president and how the stock market did and 401k specifically did under each president. And Obama so far had done a lot better. And Clinton in the second term just absolutely rocked it. So as good as Trump was doing and taking advantage of the running bull, it still didn't compare to recent past presidents at this point. [6:42] JD: Okay, everyone, chime in. Who are you going to vote for? It's fine. [6:48] John Sullivan: This is the third party candidate. [6:51] Justin: Brandon, are you seeing Joey's links that he's shooting out? [6:54] John Sullivan: Wrong call. Nice. [6:58] JD: Justin, do you have anything from the chat group you'd like to share [7:03] John Sullivan: other [7:03] Justin: than Joey and Suzanne and plenty of others saying that retireholics need to be on the COVID of 401k special. [7:10] JD: Thank you. Thank you. [7:12] Justin: People are speaking. [7:13] JD: Dude, thank you so much. [7:16] John Sullivan: Right here. [7:18] JD: So you consider yourself a journalist, right, John? I mean, that's what you are, right? [7:23] John Sullivan: Yeah. [7:24] JD: Well, I want you to know that we, the retire hogs, consider ourselves journalists as well. And Brandon and I were drunk late one night. [7:34] Justin: Text you guys never. [7:36] JD: And we somehow stumbled upon what we think is kind of breaking news. I don't know if Brandon's got anything prepped. If he doesn't, that's fine. But. Okay, we. We were digging around. I don't know why, because that's what we do. Late night drunk is look up 401k stuff, right? And found out that the. The board committee for Cal Savers, our state run plan here in California, is actually meeting tomorrow. And one of the agenda items is to push the deadline, that June 30th deadline out finally. So all those people that signed in, you heard it here first. We're breaking the news. [8:15] John Sullivan: So you're bringing value other than drinking. [8:18] Justin: Oh, take it back, Take it back. [8:20] John Sullivan: I know, right? [8:21] JD: I'm just saying it felt pretty journalistic to, like, dig into an agenda, find out that it was on the agenda. Now, they haven't approved it yet, but I'm sure they will. [8:30] John Sullivan: Well, what you gotta do is you gotta be one of the four people that follow their Twitter account. Brandon's got it. All right, so the takeaway is that retireaholics has gone legit. [8:43] JD: Yes. Yes. [8:47] Justin: There's two breakups here, though, John. You have retireaholics and then you have consultants. Plan design consultants has always been legit retireaholics. We're still trying to get there.