- Jessica Bruder, The End of Retirement: When You Can’t Afford to Stop Working.
- Tom Ricks, Why Am I Moving Left?
See Bruder being interviewed on MSNBC here. And an excerpt from her article:
Aging isn’t what it used to be. In an era of disappearing pensions, wage stagnation, and widespread foreclosures, Americans are working longer and leaning more heavily than ever on Social Security, a program designed to supplement (rather than fully fund) retirement. For many, surviving the golden years now requires creative lifestyle adjustments. And for those riding the economy’s outermost edge, adaptation may now mean giving up what full-time RV dwellers call “stick houses” to hit the road and seek work….
“We’re facing the first-ever reversal in retirement security in modern U.S. history,” Monique Morrissey of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., told me. “Starting with the younger baby boomers, each successive generation is now doing worse than previous generations in terms of their ability to retire without seeing a drop in living standards.”
That’s what thirty years of Reaganism and neo-liberal (i.e. Clinton) economics gets us. It’s what happens when you piss on the New Deal. To my Democratic and Democrat-leaning friends out there, you’re deluding yourself if you believe for a moment that electing socially liberal multi-millionaire business people (or lawyers that serve them) will turn things around.
She continues:
The very idea of retirement is a relatively new invention. For most of human history, people worked until they died or were too infirm to lift a finger (at which point they died pretty fast anyway). It was the German statesman Otto von Bismarck who first floated the concept, in 1883, when he proposed that his unemployed countrymen over the age of sixty-five be given a pension. This move was designed to fend off Marxist agitation — and to do so on the cheap, since few Germans survived to that ripe old age…
In this country, it was the Great Depression that made retirement into a reality. There were too many workers, too few jobs, and a consequent sense that the elderly needed to be nudged out of the labor pool. Francis Townsend, a California physician who had also farmed hay and managed a failing dry-ice factory, began lobbying for what came to be known as the Townsend Plan: if a worker retired at sixty, the federal government would reward him with a monthly pension of up to $200. It was partly in response to this populist initiative that FDR and a Democratic Congress passed the Social Security Act of 1935 — which, unlike the Townsend Plan, required future retirees to chip in to a common fund throughout their working lives.
After the New Deal, economists began referring to America’s retirement-finance model as a “three-legged stool.” This sturdy tripod was composed of Social Security, private pensions, and combined investments and savings. In recent years, of course, two of these legs have been kicked out. Many Americans saw their assets destroyed by the Great Recession; even before the economic collapse, many had been saving less and less. And since the 1980s, employers have been replacing defined-benefit pensions with 401(k) plans, which were originally marketed as instruments of financial liberation that would allow workers to make their own investment choices. (The upshot: Employers saved money. Workers got shafted.)
All of which is to say that Social Security is now the largest single source of income for most Americans sixty-five or older. But economists agree that it’s woefully inadequate. Nearly half of middle-class workers may be forced to live on a food budget of as little as five dollars a day when they retire, according to Teresa Ghilarducci, an economist and professor at the New School in New York City. “I call it the end of retirement,” she told me. Many retirees simply can’t survive without some sort of paycheck. Meanwhile, Ghilarducci noted, jobs for older Americans are paying less and becoming ever more physically taxing.
And Tom Ricks, Why Am I Moving Left?
In my late 50s, at a time of life when most people are supposed to be drifting into a cautious conservatism, I am surprised to find myself moving steadily leftward.
This is unexpected. It comes even as I am financially comfortable and enjoying my work. (I’m writing this from my summer home in Maine.) I’m not a natural progressive—I spent the last quarter century covering the U.S. military, first for the Wall Street Journal and then for the Washington Post, and now for Foreign Policy magazine. I have written five books about the Marines, the Army and our wars.
I am puzzled by this late-middle-age politicization. During the time I was a newspaper reporter, I didn’t participate in elections, because I didn’t want to vote for, or against, the people I covered. Mentally, I was a detached centrist. Today I remain oriented to the free market and in favor of a strong national defense, so I have hardly become a radical socialist.
But since leaving newspapers, I have again and again found myself shifting to the left in major areas such as foreign policy and domestic economic policy. I wonder whether others of my generation are similarly pausing, poking up their heads from their workplaces and wondering just what happened to this country over the last 15 years, and what do to about it.
The things that are pushed me leftward began with the experience of closely watching our national security establishment for decades. But they don’t end there. They are, in roughly chronological order:
Disappointment in the American government over the last 10 years. Our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were the first big shocks…. I believe that the invasion of Iraq was wrong, not only launched on false premises but also strategically foolish in that ultimately it has increased Iran’s power in the Middle East.
Torture. I never expected my country to endorse torture….
How we fought. I never thought that an American government would employ mercenaries in a war…
Intelligence officials run amok. I think that American intelligence officials have shown a contempt for the way our democracy is supposed to work in turning a vast and unaccountable apparatus on the citizens it is supposed to be protecting…
Growing income inequality. I also have been dismayed by the transfer of massive amounts of wealth to the richest people in the country, a policy supported over the last 35 years by successive administrations of both parties….
Bailouts for bankers. When the economic bets made by the wealthiest Americans soured in 2008, the taxpayers picked up the tab. Bankers who got government bailouts continued to award themselves multimillion-dollar bonuses…
Democracy for sale. The wealthy, abetted by the most out-of-touch Supreme Court in many decades, also have been permitted to purchase an outsized voice in American politics…
Gun massacres. I am just sickened by our tendency to accept disturbingly more frequent gun massacres as the price of being an American….
I am no better at predicting the future than anyone else. I think there are many others like me who are just as puzzled about where our country is at now, and how we got here. No doubt there are many reasons, though I believe there are clear signs that the Reagan Revolution, which made incentive-oriented, free-market solutions the default mode of both parties, is now finally petering out. I anticipate calls for more federal intervention, especially in areas where the public good is suffering, such as transportation and the cost of higher education. We may yet see a leftish generation of senior citizens, a group of aging Baby Boomers who can make common cause with a squeezed middle class and a generation of millennials whose careers have been damaged by the Great Recession while the top 1 percent have grown even wealthier.
If so, we can hope that our new Gilded Age will lead, as the last one did, to a new era of Progressivism when reform and reinvention take hold to restore a democracy gone complacent. But maybe that is asking too much for the new leftie I now seem to have become. At the very least, I hope we will cease to be a nation at ease with torture and inequality, a country that once again steers by its ideals.