The Briefing Room
General Category => Economy/Business => Topic started by: mystery-ak on December 30, 2013, 02:05:11 pm
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http://www.moneynews.com/Personal-Finance/Golden-Age-Retirement-Crisis/2013/12/29/id/544235 (http://www.moneynews.com/Personal-Finance/Golden-Age-Retirement-Crisis/2013/12/29/id/544235)
Tarnished 'Golden Age': World Braces for Retirement Crisis
Sunday, 29 Dec 2013 10:34 AM
A global retirement crisis is bearing down on workers of all ages. It will play out for decades, and its consequences will be far-reaching, experts predict.
Many people will be forced to work well past the traditional retirement age of 65 — to 70 or even longer. Living standards will fall, and poverty rates will rise for the elderly in wealthy countries that built safety nets for seniors after World War II. In developing countries, people's rising expectations will be frustrated if governments can't afford retirement systems to replace the tradition of children caring for aging parents.
The problems are emerging as the generation born after World War II moves into retirement.
"The first wave of under-prepared workers is going to try to go into retirement and will find they can't afford to do so," says Norman Dreger, a retirement specialist in Frankfurt, Germany, who works for Mercer, a global consulting firm.
continued...
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I'm not particularly sympathetic. Those baby-boomers just getting onto the retirement train had plenty of time to see to it that the retirement schemes were fully funded - they could have paid their own way - but they didn't; instead, they chose to free-ride off of the following generations in exactly the same way that idiot-boy FDR set up the original social security system - a ponzi scheme that must eventually fall apart.
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I was going to add this as a separate thread, then decided to add it here, then found out Rangerrbrew had already beat me to it.
Worth a read.
US public finance: day of reckoning (Chicago)
http://www.gopbriefingroom.com/index.php/topic,124621.msg506116.html#msg506116
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I'm not particularly sympathetic. Those baby-boomers just getting onto the retirement train had plenty of time to see to it that the retirement schemes were fully funded - they could have paid their own way - but they didn't; instead, they chose to free-ride off of the following generations in exactly the same way that idiot-boy FDR set up the original social security system - a ponzi scheme that must eventually fall apart.
Citizens in general aren't financial analysts. They rely on the systems in place, and believe the future will be somewhat predictable.
Many people DID save, invest BEYOND social security, in real estate and in stocks. But the values of such real estate and stocks fell off the table, with the Bush/Obama democrat-republican mismanagement debacle of our economy.
So I do have sympathy for these people. Their lives are turning out less financially wealthy as they had every reason to expect. They are contending with often working on well beyond retirement ages, earning less, and living on less.
The only ones escaping this are the government worker retirees. So far they are living high off the taxpayer hog.
They are in a class I'll call "beneficiaries of a windfall of timing" when government promised more than it should have.
The next step is for citizens to decide if they want to pay for it. And to see if our system of government allows them to break those foolish promises.
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Many people DID save, invest BEYOND social security, in real estate and in stocks. But the values of such real estate and stocks fell off the table, with the Bush/Obama democrat-republican mismanagement debacle of our economy.
And then there's the possibility that the stock market, which recently reached another alltime high, will plummet once again and wipe out the retirement investments of people who tried to plan ahead.
**nononono*
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And then there's the possibility that the stock market, which recently reached another alltime high, will plummet once again and wipe out the retirement investments of people who tried to plan ahead.
**nononono*
Of course. And the Fedgov may decide to prop up the growing list of bankrupt cities' underfunded pension schemes, by an Obama executive order.
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Where's the money going to come from? That's the bottom line, isn't it?