Their ev’s media hype, and the plan creates, not prevents, the funding tradeoffs.

But there’s more to it than that. The “retirement crisis” narrative is helped along by the fact that nearly no one has an incentive to deny it. Financial firms unsurprisingly want you to save more for retirement, so they’re not going to tell you that you’re over-saving. Political progressives distrust private markets and want Social Security to play a stronger role, so they downplay any progress.

The news media like frightening stories. No one clicks on an article with the headline, “U.S. retirement savings doing well.” But “Americans Entering Old Age the Least Prepared in Decades”? That Wall Street Journal article won a journalism award while getting key facts wrong about Americans’ savings and retirement incomes.

Congressional Republicans, still shell-shocked from George W. Bush’s unsuccessful 2005 effort to reform Social Security, have yet to find a new narrative.

But there’s a cost to excessive pessimism. As important as we all consider saving for retirement, households have other priorities — such as buying a home or sending their children to college, both of which have only become more expensive over time.

Expanding Social Security, as many congressional Democrats advocate to tackle our so-called retirement crisis, would leave less money for the government to tackle our other national priorities, including health care, education and infrastructure.

The simple fact, as the data show, is that never before have so many Americans saved so much for retirement, nor had stronger incomes in old age or a lower risk of poverty. That doesn’t mean the U.S. retirement system doesn’t face challenges. But it does make those challenges easier to address.