I wanted to briefly get back to the Roger Lowenstein book I mentioned a couple of posts back. I’ve now finished While America Aged. It’s a good read, chronicling just how pension debts came to be such a huge problem for this country, but I was a bit disappointed with the final chapter, Conclusion: The Way Out. It begins with this paragraph:

America is sitting on a retirement time bomb. Companies such as General Motors are fading fast and governments such as the city of San Diego are overrun with obligations. As the population ages, the problem will only get worse. Clearly, retirees need to be taken care of. But the solution cannot be to ruin once great firms or to impoverish whole cities and future taxpayers.

But other than calling for a national version of 401(k) accounts — an idea he attributes to Hillary Clinton — there’s nothing remotely new about the solutions Lowenstein offers. They are mostly strategies that sensible, level-headed people have been promoting for decades, only to have them beaten back by lobbyists and the right-wing noise machine.

From simple things like enacting legislation requiring pension sponsors to fund benefits they have committed to as they accrue (duh!) and strengthening Social Security by increasing the payroll tax and repaying the Social Security funds that have been “borrowed” from the surplus, to big ideas like national health care, they are all steps that could have been taken long ago, but for a lack of inclination and/or political will from our elected officials.

Lowenstein sees trouble ahead for those of us with a little gray in our hair:

... the private pension industry is gradually dying.

Whatever relief this brings to corporate shareholders, from the employees’ point of view the demise of pensions is a calamity in the making. True, firms without pension plans usually offer 401(k)s, which have the attraction of mobility (employees can take their accounts from job to job). However, 401(k)s don’t offer anything like the security of a pension plan.

According to the Federal Reserve, among families with retirement accounts, the median family has only $31,000. That would be okay to live on for perhaps one year; to retire on it for a lifetime would be a joke. And a third of the workforce has no retirement savings at all.

That $31,000 figure Lowenstein quotes is from a Federal Reserve Board Survey of Consumer Finances taken well before our current economic crisis, so the situation is now undoubtedly even worse.

The notion of at least a secure, if not comfortable, retirement has been a mainstay of my generation’s version of the American dream. I fear that for a great many of us that dream is dying along side the labor movement from which it came.