When the Heritage Foundation and the Brookings Institution work together, opinion leaders take notice. A new joint proposal for "Auto IRAs" is making big waves.

The New York Times calls it simply "The Way To Save." Peter Orszag calls it "powerful and pragmatic." It is "The right proposal at the right time," says David Certner of AARP. As for action in Congress, "The sooner the better," writes one top financial columnist.

The idea is a simple way to firm up retirement savings: automatically direct a portion of workers' paychecks to a low-cost IRA. The cost to the government would be modest and the burden on employers almost nothing

Increased savings, improved retirement security, and low costs: No wonder this idea is already gaining strong bipartisan support.

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Read Pursuing Universal Retirement Security Through Automatic IRAs (PDF link) by Mark Iwry and David John

During the 2005 budget reconciliation debate, crit­ics trotted out the tired old myth that Republicans were cutting spending for the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich. Many commentators accepted this as truth and repeated it, including Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, who accused the Republicans of passing a “cut-from-the-poor, give-to-the-rich budget."

The House of Representatives and the Senate recently passed, respectively, the Tax Relief Extension Reconciliation Act of 2005 (H.R. 4297) and the Tax Relief Act of 2005 (S. 2020). The two bills represent the tax reconciliation legislation of the two chambers, enacted under the guidelines of their respective bud­get resolutions.