Still Lying About The Retirement Crisis

The three-legged stool of retirement is a classic metaphor (for financial planners at least), and it basically means there are three things propping up your retirement:

• Employer pension plans: a retirement perk offered by the company you work for
• Social Security: a government benefit paid by taxes
• Personal savings: your own savings, usually investments

Two of those legs, pension plans and Social Security, are failing fast.

A lot of people blame the crisis on a change in how companies handle employer retirement plans. Pension plans are a great perk: your company saves a certain amount of money for your retirement as a benefit, often based on your tenure and salary history with the company. But these are becoming a thing of the past, as fewer companies offer this perk. From 1980 to 2008, the percentage of employees enrolled in any kind of pension plan has fallen from 38 to 20 percent, and that number is expected to continue to decline.

You can read the rest @
http://twocents.lifehacker.com/why-you-should-care-about-the-retirement-crisis-even-i-1736381655

This is horseshit.

Employer pension plans once were fully funded. But when the junk bond kings decided to raid our pension funds, Congress changed the rules to remove the fully funded requirement. Thus Wall Street and Congress worked together to fleece those funds.

Congress also is responsible for the Social Security crisis. They conspired with the President to steal the SS Trust Fund to pay for unnecessary wars which enriched the few and left our nation broken. And they have refused to fix the system by transferring more of the burden to the rich.

As far as personal savings go, if we had decent jobs we might be able to save for our future. Once again Congress was complicit in allowing most of our industries to move offshore and transfer capital out of the country without penalty. And they haven't done a damn thing to help us escape the chaos they created in our economy.