Rescuing Retirement is an interesting and important book. Millions of older Americans are living in poverty or close to it. Our retirement system is broken. And we should and can fix it. This book is about how we do that.

The full title is Rescuing Retirement: A Plan to Guarantee Retirement Security for All Americans by Tony James and Teresa Ghilarducci.

The plan is simple, and it will not cost more than our present system which works very well for some but not so much for most Americans. It will do this by redirecting some of the subsidies to those along the entire income distribution.

The authors propose a simple system that will benefit the vast majority of American. This is not a replacement for Social Security on which many depend but rather a supplement to it. I think it should work as outlined but I will defer to those with more economic or investment expertise.

The authors are certainly among those with this expertise. One is a major player in a large investment firm; the other is an economist and expert in retirement security.

It is not a long book. It is 140 pages, including many appendices which give more information on parts of the plan. It is not an expensive book, $ 7.99 for the paperback and $ 2.99 for the Kindle edition. At least those were the prices when I checked on Amazon today.

I read an advance readers copy (ARC) from NetGalley in electronic format. I thank them for that. I think the reading experience might be better in the paper copy as there were more than a few notes.

I’d recommend Rescuing Retirement to anyone interested in retirement issues. I hope it will be read by those with the ability to fix our broken retirement system, including those in the Congress, their staff, and those soon-to-be in the office of President.