Editorial: The Retirement Crisis Is Upon Us

Two-thirds of working Americans will not be able to maintain their standard of living when they retire. Many will go into poverty.

At the end of the year, we launched AlterNet’s Retirement Crisis Reporting Project. Despite the hundreds of end-of-the-year fundraising campaigns, 243 AlterNet readers contributed $6,870 to get us off to a great start. This is reader-supported, “crowdfunded” journalism at it’s best.

But this is just the beginning. We will need lots of help going forward. Unless we get serious and do something about it now, we are very quickly heading into a massive retirement crisis, not just for the huge, aging Baby Boomer generation, but for generations to come. It has to be fixed, but our leaders are intent on making it worse.

Two-thirds of working Americans will not be able to maintain their standard of living when they retire, sending many into poverty or near poverty. And none of it is our fault. Millions of Boomers, Gen Xers and others have not been able to save for the future. Pensions have disappeared. Wages have been flat. Healthcare costs have spiraled. Private plans like 401ks and 403bs haven’t kept up. There have been recessions, waves of high inflation and unemployment.

So, Social Security and other benefits have to be fixed and expanded. The frustrating part is that it is all easily fixable. But the political establishment from Barack Obama to the billionaire propagandist Pete Peterson to the Washington Post editorial page, are hard at work making it worse, by wanting to shrink benefits, not expand them.

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