Retirement: Surely You Jest

A 90% cogent article in The New York Times discusses the utter absence of any contact with reality in most Americans' retirement plans. The numbers do not come close to adding up. The article is here.

Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts. The specter of downward mobility in retirement is a looming reality for both middle- and higher-income workers. Almost half of middle-class workers, 49 percent, will be poor or near poor in retirement, living on a food budget of about $5 a day.

This means that a majority of Americans have not taken seriously the economics of retirement. They have not saved. They have been faithful Keynesians. They have spent. They have borrowed to finance this spending. They have been grasshoppers, not ants.

To maintain living standards into old age we need roughly 20 times our annual income in financial wealth. If you earn $100,000 at retirement, you need about $2 million beyond what you will receive from Social Security. .....This number is startling in light of the stone-cold fact that most people aged 50 to 64 have nothing or next to nothing in retirement accounts and thus will rely solely on Social Security.

If we manage to accept that our investments will likely not be enough, we usually enter another fantasy world – that of working longer. After all, people hear that 70 is the new 50, and a recent report from Boston College says that if people work until age 70, they will most likely have enough to retire on.

 I was warned in 1959 that the government would default on its Social Security promises. My high school civics teacher ran the numbers for us. The program would go bankrupt. It did: in 2010. The general fund is now bailing it out....The confidence that people have in the future is based on ignorance, procrastination, and naivete. The voters do not understand how close the U.S. government is to bankruptcy. I define "bankruptcy" as follows: "the inability of the Treasury to borrow money at rates low enough to keep from producing Great Depression II, but without relying on the Federal Reserve System to lend at these low rates."

By Gary North