The graph in the article surprised the hell out of me. I think I knew the info, but it really brought home to me just how much whatever it is that is available right now just isn't working.
This thread went down a road of arguing about all the reasons why, no, in fact, it's all working fine.
But it isn't working. The median retirement savings for someone in my age group is $480.00? What a bunch of assholes! Save some money!
It doesn't matter if the reason is that people are stupid or if its wage stagnation or if it's lack of personal responsibility. It truly doesn't. That's a broken system. That's a system where for all intents and purposes retirement is not a thing the average person is actually working towards or thinks is a thing.
Which might be true. I mean, if you build railroads in the sun all day every day, you can't reasonably expect to do that job until you drop dead. There's a very good chance you'll reach a point where you are unable to do that job.
But if you just type things into twitter all day, maybe you really can expire at your desk.
If instead we as a society have just failed to mandate either a level of financial literacy that avoids ruination, or mandatory savings that stave off ruination, then we should probably figure that out.
If you looked at the last 25 years as an experiment in how well people govern their own finances, then I think the empirical data is in and we can now see, the median person isn't taking care of their shit.
So two possibilities are coming:
People are going to be subsistence living off of social security, straining that system and exerting immense pressure to increase benefits right as it is running out of money, leading to a higher mandatory social security contribution rate and likely reducing the available 401k/IRA/403/457 options.
Or
Some supplemental retirement thing is going to be put into place, forcing people to save more, or (more likely) taxing those of us who have saved more.
So which option do you want as part of your ideological self-consistent worldview. Because what's been expressed so far, "everything is fine and this is a non-problem" isn't really right.
I'm just grateful Cinnabon and Pizza-hut are out there doing everything they can to get your median American to drop dead prior to being able to claim social security.
God bless the food industry.