And the tax situation doesn’t help, it adds, pointing out that the top 20 percent of earners get 66 percent of all federal retirement savings tax breaks.

Not only do older workers have little retirement savings ($12,000 on average), in spite of the $180 billion in tax breaks a year designed to encourage people to save for retirement, 35 percent of those near retirement who lack retirement plans get no benefit from such breaks whatsoever.

What Republicans have proposed in their latest legislative effort would make it even tougher for those in lower income brackets to save, since they propose paying for the tax breaks for higher-income people by “suggest[ing] the needed revenue could come from taxing 401(k) dollars on contribution rather than at withdrawal in retirement, funding current tax breaks by shifting retirement subsidies to the future.”

And that would be a major obstacle to saving for many in the lower income brackets, since, the report points out, “Tax incentives are a key driver of retirement plan coverage and adequacy.”

Depriving lower-income workers of tax breaks to save for retirement will go a long way toward worsening the already-existing retirement crisis; instead, the report suggests that Congress consider putting in place guaranteed retirement accounts (GRAs), which “provide accounts to all workers as a supplement to an expanded Social Security program,” as well as “replac[ing] regressive retirement subsidies with universal tax credits of $600 a year. This ensures that even low earners benefit from federal tax incentives to save for retirement.”