Worrying statistics about American's retirement future

And just think: the richest and most advanced country on the planet.

 

I don't ever know what someone means when they say "capitalism"

 

Challenge accepted. Here is the OP, What are the quick and easy solutions for each of these problems?

 

It figures.

 

Go back to top tax brackets that are essentially confiscatory since top incomes rose by 1,460% since 1978, exceeding inflation by far, while workers’ incomes rose by only 18.1% in the same time period, not keeping up with inflation. Put the tax into a new "Social Security" Trust Fund designed after the original S.S. legislation but dedicate it to retirees whose total income is less than a calculated minimum level (like twice the poverty rate) and raise benefits in the original SS system to match. The rate at which to raise each to make them fair would need to be determined by actuaries.

The only problem would be in getting a capitalist congress and presidency to sign it into law.

 

So...increase the income tax, and use that money to subsidize Low income social security recipients? I've not heard that solution before. Is there anyone in Congress supporting such a scheme?

 

If only we could get rid of SS.
Then people will save for themselves, more.
JK

But, every worker should pay themselves 1st. 5-10% of every paycheck should go to a savings.

 

I covered that.

 

The wealth of the top 1% is more than 42% of all wealth.

The bottom 50% owns 2.37% of all wealth.

How do you propose they do it and pay the bills too?

 

It's called pay the bills. And top of list is yourself

But those who are at very bottom will be getting assistance.

 

Well, whenever someone complains about "capitalism", there's always a lot of "one true Scotsman" thing happening.

 

Younger baby boomers are facing a homelessness crisis as rents skyrocket and outpace Social Security

Data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development obtained by The Wall Street Journal showed that adults 65 and older comprised the fastest-growing portion of homeless Americans.

From 2007 through 2017, the percentage of people 51 and older in homeless shelters rose from 16.5% to 23%, a rate greater than what would be expected just from the increase in people of that age group. In 2018, the department started tracking people 55 and older in homeless shelters, and the figure rose from 16.3% to 19.8% in 2021.
The National Health Care for the Homeless Council reported that the proportion of patients 50 or older who it serviced in 2022 was 36%, up from 25% 15 years earlier.
"This is a level of a problem that we have not seen before," Barbara DiPietro, the group's senior director of policy, told the Journal. "We are seeing older people in shelters and encampments or who are living in their cars at a rate that we never had before."

This trend seems to be exasperated by "trailing edge" boomers, the second half of the group, born between 1956 and 1964. The Wall Street Journal said this group entered the workforce and immediately felt the economic impact of the recessions in the mid-1970s and early '80s, which made the group's overall financial health more precarious as they entered their retirement age.

Many of the "trailing edge" boomers experienced homelessness for the first time later in life. A 2017 University of California, San Francisco, study found that 43.6% of the homeless adults ages 50 or older that it interviewed became homeless for the first time after turning 50.

All older people who are retired or heading into retirement are doing so at a time when two economic forces are working against them: housing costs and an end to pandemic-era aid programs.

According to the Social Security Administration, the average Social Security benefit is now $1,706 per month, more than $300 below the nearly record-high national median rent price of $2,052.

Rent increases have hit Florida -- which has the second-highest rate of US citizens 65 or older and the largest total number of people that age and above -- especially hard. Half of the 20 metro cities with the steepest rent increases since the onset of the pandemic are in Florida, the Journal reported.
Additionally, of all retirees who moved to a new state in 2022, 11.8% went to Florida. North Carolina, at 9.6%, was the only other state close to that.

Meanwhile, as the number of Americans 65 or older is expected to grow 45% between 2020 and 2040, from 56 million to 81 million, the volume of available affordable housing is shrinking.
A Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data found the US had at least 600 fewer nursing homes than it did in 2017. In Florida, there are long waiting lists for low-cost senior housing and long-term care facilities paid for by Medicaid, the Journal reported.

Government data obtained by the Journal showed homelessness was up 11% from 2022.

If housing continues to become harder to find and costs continue to skyrocket, older Americans will increasingly need to find other forms of income, or the homelessness crisis will almost certainly get worse.​

Younger baby boomers are facing a homelessness crisis as rents skyrocket and outpace Social Security, Cork Gaines (cgaines@insider.com), Business Insider, September 15, 2023

 

Only for those who are deaf and blind.

 

Again, reluctant to define terms. It makes it easier.

 

A free market is a democracy.

If the Federal Reserve Bank was part of a free makert then we would have other private corporations issuing competing currency. Instead, the government has given the Federal Reserve Bank a state sanctioned monopoly, which is exactly the opposite of a free market.

 

No discussing the details of the Federal Reserve in this thread. Stay on topic or post a link to another thread.

 

Thriving in Dem controlled cities.

 

Property taxes?

 

Right on. You authored this thread, the topic is yours.

@Kode , I started a thread about the concept of a Free-Market being a Democracy. If you are interested in the subject- http://www.politicalforum.com/index.php?threads/the-market-place-as-a-democracy.613595/

 

Neither this nor your earlier post were directed at me, yet I think the Fed is a factor in the topic you brought up. You showed reports of lot of people in bad situations and conditions and I agree that's what's going on and getting worse.

From the first comment, thoughts on fixing the problem, how to fix it and what might be the cause were posted. Was your intention to simply post the reports and let it go at that? Or, because of your concern over the "Worrying statistics about American's retirement future," wanted others' thoughts/ideas to maybe identify the cause/s and perhaps help resolve the problem? Assuming the latter, why forbid what some?/many? see as contributing to or causing the problems in your OP?

I had a lengthy response to the exchange below. Instead, leaving it in context, I'll address only the Jefferson quote to ask you a question.

My question: Could the general condition in the Jefferson quote... "deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless"... include the specific condition in your OP? And for the same reason?

 

I didn't mean you can't talk about the Fed at all, or quickly bring up the Fed's possible impact on elderly homeless, but the thread was going way too far off topic, discussing the Fed in ways that did not have too much to do with the topic.

Discussing in detail the U.S. Constitution and how that applies to the Fed was obviously going off topic. It wasn't just one or two posts either, I saw it was beginning to turn into a debate that was derailing the thread topic.
The thread topic, in case anyone forgot, is concerning statistics about people's retirement and elderly homelessness.

Quickly bringing up or mentioning something else is different from engaging in a long back-and-forth argument about it.

You could, for example, have simply written "I believe that the Fed pumping out so much money and buying so much of the mortgage equity in the American economy is one of the main causes of housing prices becoming so high and unaffordable", and that would have been perfectly fine.

 

Appreciate you taking the time to explain.

I tend to agree with your example, but don't know the degree to which it applies. I might ask, 'Is the Fed only one of other equally significant causes or actually the main cause?' But answering that leads to more about the Fed.

I can see the statistics make plain how bad things are and how much the problem has increased over the years. However, I think American's retirement future is, in essence, about the financial side, and understanding what brought this dismal situation to where it is today. My response entails the financial system created by the Fed Reserve Act and how/why the inevitable result of that system has been getting increasingly worse for decades.

I think that's what has and is causing the retirement problem, and leave it at that.

 

It might have been better to just say that and then provide a link to another thread whose topic is about how the Fed is hurting the financial well-being of the country and impoverishing people.

Because that would obviously be a long and very complicated topic, and one that not everyone is going to completely agree with, so there would probably be a lot of debate and argument about it. Not the type of thing you want to get into detail discussing in another thread that's about something else.

 

Yes I pay those. They're well under that, by a lot.

 

Where do you live?