In completely unsurprising but utterly terrifying news, 401(k)s are a sham:
The United States is on the verge of a retirement crisis. For the first time in living memory, it seems likely that living standards for those over the age of 65 will begin to decline as compared to those who came before them—and that’s without taking into account the possibility that Social Security benefits will be cut at some point in the future.
The culprit? That same thing Mathisen celebrated: the 401(k), along with the other instruments of do-it-yourself retirement. Not only did they not make us millionaires as self-appointed pundits like Mathisen promised, they left very many of us with very little at all.
You might be tempted to ask “what went wrong,” but a better question might be “why did we ever expect this to work at all?” It’s not, after all, like we weren’t warned. As early as 1986, only a few years after the widespread debut of the 401(k) and the idea that American workers should self-fund their own retirement accounts based on savings and stock market gains, Karen Ferguson who was then, as she is now, the head of the Pension Rights Center, warned in an op-ed published in the New York Times, “Rank-and-file workers have nothing to spare from their paychecks to put into a voluntary plan.”
The article notes that “Half of Americans have no workplace retirement accounts at all”, and I can certainly vouch for that: I haven’t put any money into my IRA in YEARS. Not because I don’t want to, but because there is nothing to spare. My current position is part-time, so there is no benefits package to which to contribute anyway.
Read the whole thing, and then consider investing in a couple of gallons of gasoline. If it’s a choice of abject poverty and cat food for dinner, self-immolation is preferable.
