Is Retirement Facing Extinction?

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/article/is-retirement-facing-extinction/

Retirement used to be a social platform from which economic institutions could foster greater equality. Since the Great Depression, the Social Security system has historically formed the bulwark of our welfare state, because it comprehensively redistributes wealth through a centralized trust. Union pensions leveraged worker income and employer assets to provide economic stability across a worker’s life course, up to the time he or she aged out of working life.

The traditional retirement savings vehicles that are now branded as old-fashioned and fiscally burdensome were historically a lifeline for families of color and other marginalized groups, especially in widely unionized sectors such as teaching and manufacturing work.

Although people with less education, people of color, and women generally have lower incomes in retirement, their incomes benefit disproportionately from Social Security’s redistributive effects. Women and black men have been especially reliant on public-sector pensions in career-track public service jobs.

This publicly rooted sector of the retirement system is increasingly under attack by many state governments seeking to shrink their public sectors and curtail the salaries and benefits of civil servants. According to EPI analyst Monique Morrissey, the erosion of public-sector pensions since the recession “will have a disproportionate impact on African Americans, who are more likely to work in the public sector and who for historic reasons have less wealth to fall back on.” The pension pain may hit state employees especially hard, because many of their plans are peculiarly structured to exempt them from Social Security taxes.

[Fairgo]

1. I can never retire

Thankfully, I do not want to.

[Skittles]

2. you may rethink that if you have a severe health crisis

[Fairgo]

9. Since this is my field

I rethink it everyday. Your point is well taken though. In America, if you get sick, you fall out of the social narrative. In Australia, they take care of their own. That's why I cannot come back. I can't take the risk of all that freeeeeedom.

[Pakhet]

3. I will never be able to retire

I've been working for 35 years and will be eligible to retire in another 20 years but I doubt if I'll last that long. I'm tired

[Turbineguy]

4. It's the next thing for the rich

to pillage. You can't pay CEO's 880 x what ordinary workers get without the money coming from somewhere. The beauty of stealing people's retirement now is that you defer the welfare and foodstamp costs to a later date.

When you are old (not rich) and unproductive they can give you a nice cocktail to drift off with. Yes, life in a republican paradise will be enjoyable.

[Doctor_J]

5. I could retire now and let a youngster have my job, but heritage care has made that impossible

I have to continue to work to get the lousy company healthcare plan

[Vinca]

6. I hope I never retire.

I can't afford to if I wanted to, but the truth is I would probably go nuts if I did.

[HughBeaumont]

7. Anyone who doesn't think this is a huge problem is fooling themselves.

America needs to solve this problem and solve it fast, lest you want the job market to be stagnant for many decades. Generation X is slowly creeping up there when it comes to retirement, and let me tell you something . . . anyone who thinks WE have near the multiple hundreds of thousands IT'S going to take for us to get out of the workforce . . . not even close, bub.

Like I said before, I think the pre-boomer generation were the last to have a comfortable retirement thanks to pensions. Between the multiple Wall Street shenanigans in the late 80s to 2008, the 401(k) Ruse screwed the Boomer's nest eggs eight ways until Sunday.

[Hoppy]

8. Its not the end of retirement. Its returning to a time when America was great again.

Our great-great-grandparents in the 19th century didn't have pensions. They were the ones who made 'merica great in the first place. If work till you drop was good enough for them, why do you think you're any better than they were?

Hillary will solve this by establishing a parallel Social Security system run by Goldman Sachs. Your money will be safer with them than with the drawer full of useless paper that our Dear Leader, George showed us was in that office in West Virginia. The stock market will continue to rise. Goldman's stock value will continue to rise and your money will be with Goldman's.

A rising boat floats the tide of Hillary's campaign.

[The2ndWheel]

10. A lot of things will change

Nothing lasts forever. Our modern, society-wide concept of retirement was created in a certain period of time. Variables and conditions change though. What it will become, who knows for sure, but yeah, the great depression retirement model isn't always going to exist.

Whatever we come up with, as usual, will be created in the moment, work for a while, have it's pluses and minuses, and then it won't work again after some period of time.

[FLPanhandle]

11. I've been planning for retirement since my first job out of college

I will retire in 6 years at the age of 60.

If I didn't have two children, I'd be retired now.

It's not extinct/impossible, but retirement requires early planning and the cost of having children will significantly delay retirement.

[madville]

12. Military, Government, Railroad and Utilities

Are about the last places a middle class person can comfortably retire from these days. I'm lucky to have a couple of secure pensions, employer-matched investment fund annuity and social security, that will be unheard of one day.