The U.S. is facing a retirement security crisis -- and Washington wants to make it worse

COMMENTARY | December 08, 2011
 
More and more older people will be living in poverty as it is, writes a scholar at the Claude Pepper Foundation. So why are even Democrats talking about cutting their lifelines?


By Larry Polivka
lpolivka2@fsu.edu
The same political and corporate elites who are largely responsible for the erosion of retirement security now seem dead set on making the problem even worse.

Today's workers -- many of them trapped in low wage jobs with declining benefits -- are already facing a grim future in which the kind of retirement their parents were able to take for granted is out of reach. Unemployment and stagnant or declining wages have drained American families of the capacity to save for retirement. Likewise, the replacement of defined benefits (for the half of the U.S. labor force with a pension of any kind) by defined contributions plans, which depend on the variable performance of markets, have made income from private pensions generally smaller and less reliable. Increasing health care costs have also eroded the retirement security of most workers.