Let's face it, it's hard enough just to get by these days. Saving for retirement? Now that's a pipe dream for most Americans. Why is that? Are things really that bad? Let's take a look at retirement trends in the United States and see what's behind these worrying developments.

Retirement today is like a fish out of water. Dying, 

In the slowest, most painful to- watch way, retirement is less secure than ever. Despite all of us wanting to retire someday and honestly, that doesn't seem like we're asking for a lot. You might even say the bare minimum after forty- odd years of near daily nine to five work. It's only right that one day we should all be nice and wrinkle steeping in the balmy Florida air, just a stone's toss away from an alligator in sunglasses and a burning pile of those math books that turn kids into commies. But some people have other plans, for example, the people we elect to represent us. What do politicians think about retirement? Well? Some politicians aren't huge fans of people retiring and thereby not putting every last drop of sweat into the glorious chalice of economic productivity, so a lot of them have turned to rolling back retirement benefits and pushing them later and later in life. You might not know this, but in the US, full Social Security benefits are now only available at 67 years old, two years later than what was previously guaranteed. That's not great two years. More of work at 65 is pretty brutal, but that applies mostly to people who are old today. 

For the three of you that got lost and found this video sorry for calling you old anyway. The decision to push retirement up to 67 isn't actually all that recent. It was made by Reagan back in the 80 s and slowly got phased in to apply to everyone by 2023. But with so much time since our good friend Ronald called the shots, most people watching this video will probably be subject to entirely new policies, and according to current estimates, that will mean only getting your hands on Social Security at some point in your early 70 s. At that point, most people watching this video, including me, are getting our retirement five or more years later than previous generations, despite supposedly living through the greatest ever era in human progress. You might think this is a uniquely American thing. 

Another classic example of this country loving to make the worst choice nobody asked for, but we're actually not alone this time. Retirement benefits are getting pushed back all over the world. If you're like me and you spend your time control effing the word increase on this specific Wikipedia page, you'll see that that word shows up over 40 times, decrease only shows up once, and it's not even because there's one country out there doing something special. It's because the page's editors decided to add a hypothetical scenario all the way at the bottom, just for fun. 

To take a more specific example. French President Macron has announced his plans to increase retirement age by three years if he gets a majority in the French parliament for context, the last time he tried to do pension reforms back in 2019. This happened needless to say it didn't work out too well for our Buddy Emmanuel. Nonetheless, there are plans in motion all over the world to gradually increase the age of retirement. If you're a normal person who's going to need Social Security income to finance some or most of your retirement, that means you will be working longer just for reference. Social Security is the largest source of income for those over 65, and around 97 percent of the people who make it to retirement depend on it in some capacity, so don't set your hopes on making it without social Security. Now back up just a minute.

Why would I say something so awful as the people who make it to retirement? Implying that maybe some of you won't. It's almost as if I had a statistic I was waiting to use at the perfect moment. 

Weird, maybe I'll address that in like 20 seconds, totally unrelated advocates of increasing the retirement age always have the same justification, people are just living longer, we're just getting so old. Funding for Social Security is in a tricky position because more people are spending more time in retirement, and since people are healthier now than they were before, it only makes sense that we should increase the age of retirement, at least so the story goes. But not only is this argument pretty awful, our improvements in science and technology shouldn't be used as a justification to work more. If anything, we should be going the other way. Shameless plug. This argument about increased life expectancy is only technically true, and it ignores something pretty important, something I have a shiny graph for. This is a graph of the survival rate of men in the US, differentiated by income. In other words, this graph takes two groups of men, some who make a lot, others who make very little, and tracks how many are still alive at every age. The red line represents people who are wealthier than 95 percent of the population. The blue line represents the lowest five percent of income earners by age, 6120 percent of the poorer group are already dead. 

That's 20 percent who never made it to retirement in the first place at 76, just a few years into retirement, that number jumps to around 50 percent while the wealthy group is still sitting above an 80 percent survival rate. For reference 76 is how old Dolly Parton. Henry Winkler, and Steve Martin are, meaning that if Dolly Parton had stayed in the nine to five grind, spending time hanging out with Steve and Henry might as well be up to a coin flip. It's incredibly insulting to raise the retirement age. Knowing Social Security is a necessity for poorer Americans when a very large chunk don't even make it to retirement with our current policies. When you aggregate all this data, the differences in life expectancy between the top one and bottom one percent is huge. 15 whole years.

The poorer you are, the earlier you are likely to die and the less likely you are to retire in the first place. Politicians are right that life expectancy has increased, but not for everyone, not for the poor. In some cases, the life expectancy of the poorest Americans has even gone down, so not only are the poor not living any longer, these policies mean that they will spend more of their lives working. As the age of retirement keeps getting pushed up, many will never get to retire. The result of the drive to push retirement back is that the poor suffer a double burden, shorter lives and more time spent working, while the rich enjoy double the benefits, longer lives and more time spent in retirement since they don't have to worry about being eligible for Social Security. These statistics are awful and yet another brutal example of how punishing inequality is in this country. But the researchers I got them from actually point out something really interesting about the data. After 62 years old wealth stops being as big of a factor. When it comes to death. It still matters just to be clear, but less. 
Why. 

Because 62 years old is the first time many people start being eligible for partial Social Security benefits. Once you get Social Security, your odds of living get better and start looking a little more like the odds that richer Americans have. Basically, benefits start even out the scales if you want to phrase that in more human terms, getting Social Security earlier literally saves and extends the lives of poorer Americans, giving them more time to enjoy life and not working in old age. It's not nearly on par with their wealthier counterparts, but nonetheless helps bridge that gap. What this means and what you need to hear when politicians start pushing Social Security further back is that they are okay. With more poor people dying earlier, they're okay with more people working longer and more people never reaching retirement. That's just what happens when eligibility gets pushed back. Even just a few years, politicians know that their wealthy donors couldn't care less about the official retirement age. They have no need for Social Security and can retire whenever they want. But at the end of the day, the later politicians draw the line on retirement, the luckier or the wealthier you have to be to enjoy it. 

You can argue this is a necessary solution to make Social Security financially solvent, but it's clearly the worst one. Financing programs doesn't have to cause the emiseration of senior citizens in already precarious situations. You might think well that sucks, but I'll be okay. I have a job and I started working pretty young. Technically. I should be fine without Social Security for a couple extra years and then I can probably afford to retire before getting benefits. And oh, if it were only that simple, my sweet summer child. 

Retirement literally isn't what it used to be. Back in the 20 th century, people relied mostly on pensions for retirement. Basically, employers would calculate and then finance retirement based on a person's years spent working and things like life expectancy. Pretty solid service covered around 40 percent of the US workforce and acted as a guarantee of retirement. Once you were done working pensions were stable. You knew ahead of time exactly what you would get regular payouts for the rest of your life. Your employer was the one held responsible and you weren't forced to deal with all the risk. But in 1978 that all changed. After businesses looked to cut costs and maximize shareholder profits, they lobbied and got the government to step in. Out of this movement for Lesnar business operations came the 400 and One K, a small section of the US tax code that turned out to have massive impacts. As you probably already know, 401Ks are personal savings accounts built on salary deductions, with the main advantage being able to deduct or defer taxes primarily by avoiding capital gains tax and essentially setting money aside tax-free. Sometimes with your employer contributing a little bit and misleadingly saying they're matching it. 

This change from pensions to 400 and one KS saves businesses a ton of money and so pension programs got completely gutted covering just 13 percent of the workforce by 2 thousand and eight. As it always goes, somebody had to get the raw end of that deal and that turned out to be the workers shocker. 

400 and One KS shift the burden of risk and cost out of the employer's hands and into that of employees. Part of the reason that's the case is that a lot of the money people are setting aside in 400 and one KS isn't just sitting in a box, it goes into investments portfolios of stocks. Although investments are relatively stable over time, the boom and bus cycle of capitalism naturally make some moments moments that last several years an awful time to retire or to be retired. If you Google things like How to protect your 400 and one K from a recession, you'll find pages and pages of financial advisors telling retirees and people worried for their future, how recessions will naturally put a strain on their retirements, telling them that they should act conservatively during these difficult economic periods, which I can't emphasize enough, they have no control over. Average run-of-the-mill employees are burdened with risk deep into their retirements, even after they've stopped working. 

And I hate to think that after this impassioned rant about 400 and one Ks. You might think we should just go back to when times were good and more people had pensions because no, we absolutely shouldn't. Pensions were already a compromise. We could have had an expansive social security system that covered most retirement costs and actually takes care of seniors this whole time. But American companies needed yet another way to twist your arm and keep you working at an awful job. After all, it's a lot harder to leave if on top of your salary, your retirement on the line. 

You'd think this would all be bad enough for retirees and future members of the Gray Society, but wouldn't you believe it? It actually gets worse for starters. Saving for retirement today is incredibly difficult. In 2013, a full 52 percent of Americans above 55 had literally no retirement savings whatsoever. And how can you blame them? It's hard enough just to get by right now, much less plan ahead. Real wages have been stagnating for decades. Benefits are a rarity in an ever more gigified economy built on the back of the retail sector, and inflation is digging ever deeper holes in domestic budgets. But all of that is relatively unsurprising and right-wing pundits will just turn this around on individuals to say that they should just be more austere, more acetic, and more conservative with their finances. Blaming money problems on avocado toast or whatever the Gen X equivalent is I don't know plain toast. 

The problem with that narrative is that even when Americans are able to set money aside even when they follow all the punishing rules, conservatives hold up about living within your means despite working full-time jobs. Even then, saving money for retirement happens on predatory terms. For that, we have to thank a relatively recent change. Back in 2020, the Trump Labor Department snuck in a policy concerning 400 and One K Investments. 400 and One Ks could now be invested anywhere businesses want. Employers could channel retirement savings for their employees through any sort of investment firm which, as you might expect, meant towards firms with riskier assets and higher upfront fees. This was the product of some pretty gross lobbying by Blackstone, a private equity firm which got its wishes granted after dumping a cool three million dollars in a Trump supportive super PAC. Thanks to this handy green wheel grease, the Trump admin waved through this change to 400 and One Ks under the guise of expanding the freedom of American workers to invest their retirement savings anywhere they want. 

Obviously the real freedom this policy changed guaranteed was the freedom to get fleeced. 

These services do not deliver better returns than low- fee stock index funds but take big cuts at the top and use that money to advertise their very normal results as if they were the product of investing. Super geniuses. 

Between 2 thousand and six and 2015. One Oxford researcher estimates that these private equity firms made an eyewaing 200 and 30 billion dollars, calling it the largest transfer of wealth in the history of modern finance from a few 100 million pension scheme members to a few 1000 people working in private equity. 

That process only got worse thanks to the freedom to use retirement funds on quote risk and quote more exclusive services under the new Trump policy and as a side note back when he was running for office.

Biden called this quote yet another example of President Trump putting the interest of Wall Street ahead of American workers and families. Once he got into office, his labor department did the same thing. Funny how that works. With all these forces conspiring against retirees, it's no surprise that many people of retirement age live out their final years in retail jobs or rvs, traveling across the country to be seasonal laborers in short-term gigs that offer them just enough to get by no benefits and long, strenuous work hours. Amazon is actually one of the biggest companies to have capitalized on this workforce through programs like Camper Force. They're like Marvel characters except with the power of super exploitation. This labor force, made up mostly of elderly people, is a boon for Amazon because since they're desperate for income and never end up sticking around for too long, they never get the chance to unionize. People who should otherwise be retired make for perfect plug-andplay labor. Now it's time for the conclusion. 

I've said a lot of stuff, but admittedly the title and intro to this video are a little dramatic. Many of you reading  should hopefully retire, at least if we go by what's happening to people entering retirement today. The point of this video is not to definitively prove that you specifically won't be able to retire one day, but to alert you to some very worrying trends that if they're not stopped and actively reversed, we'll make retirement an unattainable luxury that could legitimately slip out of your hands.