"In the richest country in the history of the world, a secure and dignified retirement should be available to every American, not just the extremely wealthy."
Regular Americans are struggling to survive in a nightmare dystopia. News and weather at 11.
Not surprising that a lot of boomers got left behind. The American system is designed to grind everyone to zero with overwhelming debt to keep everyone working at nonliving wages.
Making sure income can’t match debts is a form of wage slavery. Company towns with mines back in the day. This current “economy” is that bullshit on steroids.
For some fucked up reason SS tax is only up to something like $165k income. So a textbook regressive tax. Ridiculous. Don't put a limit on it. There. The shit is funded until climate change creates starvation and mass human migrations of such size that there is a break down the social structure.
I'm Only 30 but I have no plans for retirement savings. How can I when half my paycheck goes to a roof over my head and a quarter goes to taxes and another quarter goes to food, clothes, and other necessities?
By the time I'm fifty it will probably be 60% to a roof, 30% to taxes and 10% to food and clothes.
This is exactly why state pensions are the norm in Europe, and I think many other places around the world.
Here in Portugal, your taxes accumulate pension credit similar to social security in the US, but when you retire you receive around 80% of your highest salary over your career, instead of a few hundred dollars or whatever from American social security.
The report offers two main solutions to the retirement crisis: expanding and strengthening Social Security—"the most successful government program in our nation's history"
Social Security has each generation depend on the next generation paying for its retirement. That's kind of what happened historically, when kids took care of aging parents. Problem is that everyone else's kids pay for your retirement, which means that your incentive to do the work of raising kids goes away; Social Security puts the load on people who have kids to turn them into the next generation of productive workers. It's great if you never raise kids, but it's a pretty raw deal if you do raise kids.
It also deals poorly with scenarios where the population pyramid inverts -- like, birth rates fall off and such. Then suddenly instead of lots of kids supporting a few older people's retirement, you have a lot of retirees expecting a few younger people to pay for their retirement.
I'd kinda favor 401(k)s or something more like that; that has each generation fund its own retirement, rather than relying on the next. That way, the payments in are proportional to the size of the population cohort, rather than proportional to the size of some other population cohort (like, the next generation).