I was agreeing with the author on every point, until I got to this part:
"But the biggest obstacle may be that in an era of stagnating incomes, many people just don’t make enough money to build retirement nest eggs."
Oy, wat?! You can save for retirement on pretty much
any income level greater than 0. It's just a question of how you spend your money now and plan to spend it in retirement. As the MMM credo goes, the path to any retirement (be it early, normal, or late) is that it's not what you make, it's what you spend vs what you save.
I also take issue with the tone of the phrase, "many people just don't make enough money." As if to imply that here in the free world, nobody has any control over how much money they make. Excepting those very rare individuals with certain physical and/or mental disabilities who are dependent on others, this is utter hogwash. The rest of us are only cogs in the machine if we choose to be.
And then the final straw for me was listing superfluous luxuries like cable TV, internet, cell phones, movies, restaurants, family vacations, car loans, and a rather large grocery bill as "necessities." Well no shit people can't save for retirement, if this is truly representative of the average American family, they're throwing it all down the crapper to begin with!