Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
This is the same demographic that overwhelmingly votes for Republicans. I am finding it very hard to empathize.
That said, perhaps this train wreck will serve as an object lesson for the next generation about creating and maintaining social safety nets.
I always empathize. At the end of the day it comes down to education and rural parts of this country are massively underserved when it comes to educational spending. I come from a rural community and it seems like everyone regardless of party lines knows the issues but it’s infuriating to see people vote against their self interest because they’ve been disincentivized to discuss things with their neighbors and come up with the best solutions for their community
Except they won't call it a social safety net, because Socialism is evil. They'll call it something like "Returns from your tax investment" that masks the fact that the younger generation is paying for the older one to retire and make room for the younger generations promotions.
Maybe they'll call it "Patriot Security" or some other bullshit term
Agreed, the boomers are finally suffering after all the cruelty they inflicted on us.
Let me find my champagne.
This isnt just boomers, it's into Gen X too.
Boomers: 1946 to 1964: 59 - 77
Gen X: 1966 and 1980: 43 - 57
"Only 1 in 10 low-income workers between the ages of 51 and 64 had any funds put away for retirement "
I'm young genx, I hope we're not that stupid, we should have learned something what with Boomers trying to scam us literally every fucking day of our lives.
But if they haven't, whoops, another point to Darwin.
What gets me riled up is I work w/ a bunch of GenX and some don't even contribute to the 401k that is matched 6% (aka FREE MONEY). I just don't get it, my leave money on the table. Go low risk if your not sure...
Do you know if they have the economy to actually "loose" 6% of their salary?
It might be "free money" in their retirement fund but they still have to afford to actually add anything to it.
He owns 2 houses and a plane, plus gets disability from the military (I have no issue w/ tat but an additional revenue stream)
It's not that...
Boomers legitimately never imagined they would get old, in their minds they're all like Trump, stuck in their flush of youth, they are Al Bundy still celebrating his 4 touchdowns in one game on permanent loop.
And sadly, while they abused the fuck out of us, some of us caught that same disease.
I think those years make no sense. People born in 1965 are nothing..?
Ghilarducci said. "What is surprising is that all the effort of the government and the changes we had in the last 40 years has not helped middle-income workers."
I dont find that surprising at all
I'm deeply curious what "effort" they are talking about. The article was quite clear that the US just have continued, and improved upon, its long standing tradition of "fuck you I got mine".
That's a stunning reversal for millions of households during a 12-year period that included economic growth and huge stock gains following the end of the Great Recession.
Wow, it's almost as if most people don't get any gains from the stock market booming... /s
For most people a strong stock market only mean, in best case, that they don't lose their jobs. It doesn't have any real positive effect on their wages. When it goes well for companies we're told to not ask for too high salary due to inflation. In hard times were told not to ask for too much to save our jobs.
The only time we get an increase in salaries is when there's either a lack of skilled workers or when we create an artificial lack of skilled workers through unions and strikes.
by design. NOW GET BACK TO WORK!
Some of my family members are going through this right now, with one being 74 and not having a penny saved. He still works manual labor jobs at the moment, but I doubt it can continue for much longer due to his health declining. But his situation has more to do with the fact he spent and spent throughout his life with the idea that his children were going to take care of him in his elder years.
This in turn didn't work out because his children don't want to take care of him. It would put such a big financial burden on them they wouldn't be able to take care of their own families.
Its requiring the app to read the article
A growing number of Americans face the prospect of retiring without a penny in savings.
Only 1 in 10 low-income workers between the ages of 51 and 64 had any funds put away for retirement in 2019, compared with 1 in 5 in 2007 prior to the Great Recession, according to a recent analysis by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Those workers have median earnings of about $19,000 annually, noted the study, which examined data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances and other sources.
That's a stunning reversal for millions of households during a 12-year period that included economic growth and huge stock gains following the end of the Great Recession. And while poor workers lost ground, high-income Americans — who earn about $282,000 per year — enjoyed a surge in their median retirement assets, which almost doubled to $605,000 during the same period, the GAO found.
The widening retirement gap among Americans is similar even when examining a longer time period, said Teresa Ghilarducci, a noted retirement expert and professor of economics at The New School for Social Research in New York. She's working on new research that examines older workers' retirement assets going back to 1992, when 401(k) plans, known as defined contribution plans, were replacing traditional pensions, or defined benefit plans, as Americans' primary retirement vehicle.
Only the top 10% of older workers by income have increased their retirement assets since 1992, while the bottom 90% "got no significant increase," she told CBS MoneyWatch.
"What is depressing about [the GAO's] work and my own work is that we're looking at people right about to retire," she said. "They've lived their whole lives, their working careers, under this new system of voluntary defined contribution plans, a decrease in defined benefit plans and a decrease in Social Security benefits — and this is the result."
More Americans are likely to enter their senior years living in poverty because of these trends, Ghilarducci predicted. She noted that financial hardship is already rising among senior citizens, who were the only age group to see an increase in poverty rates in the most recent U.S. Census data.
Benefits go to the top
The decline in retirement readiness among millions of low-income Americans comes down to a few factors, including widening income inequality and a tax system that provides more savings benefits to the rich, according to the GAO and Ghilarducci.
Retirement savings "come from earnings," Ghilarducci noted. "They don't come from inheritances, they don't come from gifts — they come mainly from earnings, so when you have an earnings growth gap you're going to have a retirement asset accumulation gap."
From 1970 to 2018, median income for top-earning households rose 64%, while low- and middle-income people saw their earnings increased 43% and 49%, respectively, over the same time period, according to Pew Research Center. As a result, wealthier Americans now bring in almost half of the nation's aggregate income, up from 29% in 1970; at the same time, middle- and lower-income households have seen their slice of the pie diminish.
Many low-wage workers lack access to employer-sponsored retirement plans like 401(k)s, and pensions have almost disappeared from private industry, with only 15% of private-sector employees having access to them, according to the Labor Department.
The tax system also rewards higher-income employees for saving for retirement thanks to benefits such as tax-deductible retirement contributions, while low-income workers don't receive the same incentives, the GAO noted. The top-earning households receive about 60% of the tax benefits from retirement accounts, while the lowest-income Americans get 5%, according to the agency.
"A high income worker can get up to $7,000 in savings on their taxes from having saved the maximum, and low-income workers who save the maximum get nothing," Ghilarducci noted.
Middle-class also going backward
The middle-class isn't doing much better than low-income workers, the GAO report also found. While the share of middle-income households with retirement accounts didn't change much from 2007 to 2019 — hovering at about 60% — the median account balance for this group has sunk from $86,800 in 2007 to $64,300 in 2019, according to the analysis.
"[W]ealthy households have nine times more saved than the average middle-class household, and just 10% of the lowest-income families have anything saved at all," Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont commissioned the GAO report, said in a statement about the research.
Workers between 50 and 64 could face another retirement crunch in a decade, with the Social Security's trust fund reserves slated to be depleted in 2033. If that occurs, retirees will see their Social Security payments cut by about by about 25% — a reduction that would cause hardship for many, but especially among those households that haven't been able to save on their own for retirement.
The GAO's findings underscore the need to shore up Social Security and make changes to the retirement system to more Americans save, Whitehouse and Sanders said in their statement.
"Retirement has always been fragile for low-income workers," Ghilarducci said. "What is surprising is that all the effort of the government and the changes we had in the last 40 years has not helped middle-income workers."
I found out last year my parents have no pension or savings. They are both over 60. It really stressed me out but my siblings seemed to have no issues. I was so glad that my mum pulled me aside a month later to tell me she had secrets saving stashed for them but it's bizarre that up until then I heard no complaints from anyone else in my family.
The GAO’s findings underscore the need to shore up Social Security and make changes to the retirement system to more Americans save, Whitehouse and Sanders said in their statement.
That could be one interpretation.
Alternately, we could raise the Medicare entitlement age by... 5, maybe 10 years, only for those not already enrolled (but hey, we can go retroactive too, why not). After 10 years we can revert the age back down.
I suspect the problem (the incredibly unhealthy problem that requires everyone else to take care of their needs because they're special and were at woodstock and you weren't) would take care of itself.
I mean, if there's one thing Boomers hate more than anything, it's socialized medicine, so we're doing them a favor, really.