Dallas Salisbury, president of the Employee Benefit Research Institute ^[1], has long been a go-to numbers guy for anyone writing about retirement issues. On Tuesday, he urged reporters to use data to knock down myths and cut through political rhetoric.

One of Salisbury’s targets is the Universal IRA proposal that’s included in President Barack Obama’s budget. It would require employers to offer payroll deductions into an Individual Retirement Account, and their workers would automatically participate unless they opted out. Salisbury doesn’t object to the proposal, but he does object to the name.

The proposal excludes companies with 10 or fewer employees, and companies less than two years old. That, Salisbury says, leaves a big gap in something advertised as “universal”:

Most of the group of 75 million Americans without access to a plan at work would be excluded from those so-called universal proposals. I’d encourage you to look behind the words and force honest labeling on these proposals, even if people don’t want you to do so.

Another Salisbury pet peeve: Pundits and politicians who claim that the 401k retirement system is broken. At their peak, traditional defined-benefit pensions provided payments to fewer than a quarter of private-sector retirees, and the average defined-benefit payout is less than $2,500 a year. Compared to that reality, instead of people’s semi-mythical beliefs about gold watches and gold-plated pensions, the 401k doesn’t look so bad, Salisbury says:

Any person leaving a 401k plan with $35,000 or more in a single sum distribution would be able to buy an annuity with at least as much income as the average defined benefit pension recipient. … You can’t argue that $2,300 from a defined benefit plan is success and the equivalent  from a 401k plan is failure. I love them all, but you want to make people present real data rather than notional information.

Despite all the doom and gloom you may hear from other retirement experts, Salisbury remains upbeat:

The state of the American retirement system is as strong as it has ever been. We actually have a bigger percentage of the American labor force than at any time in history accumulating retirement savings across the years.