If this was a company pension fund in a small company or a small union it would be easy to track down who had committed this betrayal of trust and punish them...
Why is it that I knew about this problem 40 years ago, saved my own money and prepared for retirement and others didn't even know it was coming?
You realize that every single baby boomer retiring now or soon was alive 40 years ago. The magazine articles (remember them? printed on paper they were) I read way back then showed the fallacy of SS and most retirement plans. I looked on SS exactly the same way the Supreme Court did -- it is a tax, not a promise to pay a certain benefit. DW and I saved, invested, and then saved and invested some more.
Today we may be some of the few boomers who are OK. Now, losing SS would not be any fun, but it would not kill us either.
This is not an unforeseen problem, it is a problem brought on by believing politicians. Maybe the guilty are those who believed the lies.
You realize that every single baby boomer retiring now or soon was alive 40 years ago. The magazine articles (remember them? printed on paper they were) I read way back then showed the fallacy of SS and most retirement plans. I looked on SS exactly the same way the Supreme Court did -- it is a tax, not a promise to pay a certain benefit. DW and I saved, invested, and then saved and invested some more.
Today we may be some of the few boomers who are OK. Now, losing SS would not be any fun, but it would not kill us either. "
You said it better than I could. We've always assumed that SS would be broke and unavailable to us by retirement. We've saved and invested through all the ups and downs of repeated job losses. We've both had to re-make ourselves in the job market, seek additional qualifications, and take lower-paying positions to keep an income stream. Throughout all this we've managed to save, raise two kids, and put them through college without debt. We're approaching retirement age, and although we'd hate to do without SS, we should be able to manage as long as the idiots in DC don't find a way to confiscate our savings. I expect they'll try.
We've seen a lot of our peers take expensive vacations while we shared a place with friends, went camping, or visited family. They bought expensive new cars while we bought used, ran them until they died, and hubby did all the repairs. We've lived in an older home which he also repairs. He taught our sons how to fix things. It used to be the American way, and for some of us it still is. Self reliance. Hard to achieve when they're taxing and regulating it all so heavily but not impossible either. We worry for our kids, but we also know that we've given them the best start we could, and we have their backs as they get started on their adult lives.