We will see a huge indigent geriatric population in the hear future. They will be a pitiful burden to society or they will die terribly.
In the past, before real retirement, we just worked until we died or depended on the family to take care of us in our old age. Think Grandpa Walton. Now the Boomers have been thrown to the wolves and most did not have a clue how to manage retirement, how much it actually would take or have the knowledge to not be bilked by the Wall Street Wolves that the new frontier of 401Ks would make even richer. The power of collective bargaining by powerful pension funds disappeared and in a strategy of divide and conquer the Financial Fiends have figured out how to harvest huge amounts of pension savings.
“We saw in the 1980s a shift from pensions to 401(k)s; that was a raw deal for workers. These retirement plans were marketed as an instrument of financial freedom, but they were really transferring risk from the shoulder of the employers to the backs of the workers.”
Boomers are at the vanguard of this new scheme and there is no guarantee for any of them that it will work at all. Risk of longevity and uncertainty of withdrawal rates owing to the ups and downs of the investments has been moved from the many to the individual. There is no provision for spreading of risk. Pension schemes have been available in other countries for quite some time. These do spread risk but are illegal in the United States. I wonder why?
Boomers were often cast aside in the Great Recession as the most expensive employees with the greatest medical liabilities. The worker shortage that is coming will not help them. They will be too old and too feeble to participate.
No doubt, the donor class will ensure Illegal aliens and H-1B workers are available to pick up the slack. I found out the hard way.
>>We will see a huge indigent geriatric population in the hear future. They will be a pitiful burden to society or they will die terribly.
The other issue with an aging population is the increasing rate of Alzheimer’s and dementia. We really need serious research money on a cure or the country will be really messed over by this by the mid part of this century.