May 01, 2026 09:12 AM UTC

There Are Jerks, And Then There's Sen. Larry Liston

• 0 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

On Tuesday, the Colorado Senate’s Business, Labor, and Technology Committee heard debate on House Bill 26-1010, which aims to increase support by the state for older workers who are increasingly forced to remain in the workforce past their retirement age due to cost of living that exceeds their retirement plans. The bill itself is pretty basic stuff, requiring the state to collect data on older workers, and report that as part of the legislature’s annual SMART Act lawmaker learning sessions. It also requires that at least one person over 55 serve on higher ed advisory boards. Despite its innocuous nature, the bill passed the Colorado House on party lines, and again split 3-2 in the BLT Committee on Tuesday.

But before the bill got out of committee Tuesday, Republican Sen. Larry Liston of Colorado Springs used the occasion to take what can best be described as a callous and bizarrely broad swipe at older workers everywhere:

LISTON: As an older American myself, and I appreciate the testimony of the witnesses and so forth, you know, I’m a little chagrined today, not just because of this, far from it, but you know, for the last, I’ll say at least 30 years, probably longer than that, but at the last 30 years, you know, it’s been out there for all Americans to actively plan for their retirement, and to put money away, save, invest, and I’m all for older people working and all that, but I find it just, like I say, here after the last 30 plus years when there’s been news story after news story and articles and testimony and, You know, that… That people need to plan for their retirements and here we are 30 plus years later after all of the information that’s out there that unless people are just living under a rock which I guess some people are that they find when they’re now that they’re 65 years and older that that they come up short. [Pols emphasis] And I know there’s a lot of factors out there, but I just find it a befuddling that people today are saying, gosh, you know, here I am now 65, 70, 75 years old and I don’t have enough for retirement. Well, where have you been the last 30 and 40 years? What have you been doing?

You know, there’s, you know, we’ve had the advent of 401K plans that have been around for the better part now of 40 years. We’ve innumerable. Retirement plans that most businesses offer. We have Social Security, which has never been meant for the, as your sole means of support in retirement. Anybody that’s thought about that, that geez, I worked 40 years or 50 years and I’ve got Social Security. I don’t know what they’re thinking. So, you know, I’m just a little chagrin that… That we hear that people are in their older working years and they’re saying that they don’t have enough or so forth. So I just am, I’ll say to a certain degree, venting because I’m just amazed that people today with all the information and the encouragement of at the local level newspaper articles, the state level, the federal level. Uh… There’s legislation out there that it encourages young people today in their twenties and thirties when they were in their thirties forty years ago or thirty years ago and now they’re seventy and they go gosh I don’t have enough for retirement so you know I’m just uh… I’m just venting a little bit so thank you very much.

So first of all, there are plenty of older workers today who are still in their jobs because they want to be, not because they are forced to for financial reasons. Presumably that includes…Sen. Liston himself? But for workers who don’t have a choice but to remain on the job as long as possible to pay their bills, Liston’s airy presumption that they just “didn’t plan” for their golden years is nothing short of Marie Antoinette-level arrogance. Rising costs have squeezed family budgets for decades while retirement plans shifted from defined benefits to defined employee contributions. And you can’t save for retirement when you’re living paycheck to paycheck, which a majority of Americans now do.

And the worst part is, all this bill does is collect data on the issue. After all this insulting bluster, in the end Sen. Liston didn’t even want to know.

Larry Liston as longtime readers know has been plagued with foot-in-mouth disease throughout his exceptionally lengthy tenure in the Colorado General Assembly on account of being temporarily knocked out of his seat in a primary–going back to 2008 when he made headlines for dismissing unwed teenage mothers as “sluts.” This one may not be salacious, but arguably Liston insulted many more Coloradans this time.

When the door finally closes on the Larry Liston era, such buffoonery is what he’ll be remembered for.