Former Fed Chairman Volcker Favors Increasing Retirement Age

[lib2DaBone]

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-02-19/former-fed-chairman-volcker-favors-increasing-retirement-age.html

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Bernutke wants to cut Social Security... Volcker wants Seniors to work longer.

The only problem is... that because of discrimination in the workplace, you can't get a job if you are over 50.

No health care? No problem.. you can crawl to work on your hands and knees.

[nightrain]

1. knr. Easy to say from their perspective! Work us till we drop I guess...

So many millionaires dispensing advice...

[invictus]

7. +1

[laughingliberal]

26. Paul O'Neill under Bush was of the same mind

Remember? He saw no reason why able bodied seniors should not continue to provide for their own needs. Well I guess they didn't spend their lives running their asses up and down hospital floors caring for the sick and having panic attacks from the stress. I would also guess they had the best of medical care over the years. The average age of 'retirement' for a nurse is 57. Many go out disabled. The lucky ones have a spouse who can continue earning to provide for the family. And no one tells the innocent nursing students this little nugget.

[nightrain]

29. yep. That is the truth!

[Donnachaidh]

2. seniors have already beat him to it

The average age of the grocery baggers at our supermarkets is 70 to 80. they can't make it on Social Security and that Medicare prescription POS has forced them to work to pay that two thousand five hundred dollar doughnut hole they get hit with every year.

And Obama made yet ANOTHER deal with Pharma protecting THEIR profits.... :grr:

[npk]

3. I don't. n/t

[saigon68]

4. Fuck Him

Lift beef in a slaughter house and have your back go out when you are 48

Fuck that piece of shit

[madrchsod]

5. there`s a whole lot of us that are falling apart....

these people live in another dimension.



hell if i were an employer...i would`t hire me!

[truedelphi]

23. People like Volcker did their jobs sitting at a desk

With assistants up the Whazoo, two hour lunches and the security of a six figure paycheck.

Then when they think about things, they think "Working a few extra years wouldn't be that hard for people. After all, I could do it."

[Hansel]

6. How about just eliminating the cap on how much income you pay the tax on

and decreasing the percentage each person pays?

[vssmith]

22. YES! Yes! Yes!

[boomerbust]

8. I applied

For a fucking dishwashing job at the local resort and got laughed at by the young lady doing the hiring. If you're over 50 forget it.

[Bonhomme Richard]

9. Yeah, well he has got his.

More of the same.

[demtenjeep]

10. My father died at 65 on the day of his retirement

He had leukemia, probably from his aircraft job.

He did NOT get to retire,

Fuck Volcker

[guitar man]

11. Fuck Volcker

Howany years actual work has that fucker put in ?

:grr:

[invictus]

18. +1

[slipslidingaway]

12. Another snip ...

"...Volcker also suggested that mortgage rates could rise soon, saying that while rates are now “very low” it is “a question” whether they will remain so.

“The mortgage market in the United States is in trouble. It’s totally dependent, heavily dependent on government participation,” Volcker said. “It shouldn’t be that way. That’s going to have to be re-constructed”

Volcker, chairman of the White House’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac troubled.

“It’s evident that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not a good idea in the first place,” Volcker said. “This hybrid public-private thing sooner or later was going to get us in trouble, and it sure got us in trouble.”

[UTUSN]

13. He's drawing SOMETHING - pension, SocSec, what about HIM?!1 n/t

[eridani]

14. Great. No jobe created for a decade and the way to fix that is

--to dump more seniors into the employment pool.

[upi402]

15. "work til yer dead suckers!" -ebeneezer n/t

[HughBeaumont]

16. What I'm being told now is that our generation (X) is likely to never retire.

It's either being explained to us in two ways. The first way is flat-out honesty: we'll likely never be able to save the money needed because our wages will likely never match our cost needs. The second way is even more odious: that retirement is "overrated" and an "active lifestyle is needed to combat the depression and medical issues that come with old age" and "our minds need to stay fresh". In other words, the "positive thinking" fluff they've been trying to foist on us while they stagnate our salaries and fire us en masse.

What it all boils down to for us is that by the time we're supposed to be saving and investing money, no one ever told us that the very act of making a living will likely drain you of all that extra cash. You know, unless you live in a cramped hovel and live on Kraft Mac and Cheese for 20 years. By the time we're supposed to amass a decent sum of money, none of us have a dime. And it's all . . . "our fault".

That's why these financial self-help books gall me to no end, but somehow they still sell; the plans they have drawn up usually depend on the right circumstances. There can never be layoffs. There can never be triple digit emergencies or repairs at the start of the savings. There can never be a major illness. You have to buy the right house. You have to live on the extreme cheap. You must get a 8-11% return each and every year without fail. You must put away at least 100 to 200 dollars away every month and compound it.

We've been sold a moldy bill of goods.

The Boomers were allowed to retire, but as they've seen, it's not at all comfortable. Many are postponing retirement and still working because their bills and medical expenses are too high and their wages haven't matched the skyrocketing cost of living. That's why it only applied to those who . . . had no landmines. It appears that having no landmines is becoming a lottery in itself.

I think the WWII generation was the last generation that was allowed to retire comfortably, and the reason for that is that they were the last generation which had a reasonable cost of living with a wage to match. They were the last to have a reasonable tax structure to assure a boring, smooth economic flow of consumption and production rather than the boom, BUBBLE, CRASH casino economics we've been nailed with. They weren't, for the most part, affected by Asia or Europe, because they were either in a state of rebuilding or still backwater third-worlds with no modernization. They had pensions and benefits guaranteed, whereas now the corporate leaders shifted all responsibility for our investments and medical needs on us.

Unless we do something to reign in corporate irresponsibility, we'll probably never see what our fathers and grandfathers got to see. I'm dreadfully afraid that we're going to have a glut of educated young people working lousy jobs or living at home for a long time because they'll never make it out of the starting gate.

[invictus]

17. +1,000,000,000,000

[leftyladyfrommo]

19. Well, not only that but most people just don't have the physical strength

to keep working at regular jobs as they get older. Lots of health problems by then. Just things like arthritis make keeping up with younger people impossible. So the only jobs older people can get are ones that don't pay anything.

[hollowdweller]

20. My thoughts on this from the inside

True people ARE living longer and SOME CAN work longer.

But I see people filing for Social Security Disability all the time in their mid 50's to early 60's that are denied but there's no way they can do their old jobs.

When somebody is say 50's and maybe overweight or smokes or just heredity and they have been like a coal miner, or a truck driver, or work in a store and have to be on their feet all day, nurses, personal care givers etc, those people their jobs have wore them out but they aren't quite bad enough to qualify for disability because at that age SS disability regs are such that maybe there's some lighter type of job they could do.

The problem is as mentioned in a post above very unlikely they can find one of those jobs in their area and with the chronic health problems that they would be hired.

So a lot of these people if we raise the retirement age they will be screwed. They will be sick to work a full day but won't be eligible for any help. Since welfare reform they won't qualify for any benefits from the DHS so who takes care of them???

This whole cutting SS thing really galls me because more than ever before we have tons of people who worked retail, or personal care, or fast food 35 40 years with no benefits and SS is going to be all they have.

Seriously this whole private account 401K bullshit won't work for so many people I know because their entire working lives they have just made enough to pay the bills and that's it. Is this how we reward hard work in our country??

[WriteDown]

28. The problem is one of lifespan and # of retirees..

As the lifespan continues to increase and as the ratio of retired people to working people continues to increase, it leads to a very sticky wicket. To make matters worse people are not only living longer, but require a great deal of medical care in their late-later years.

[Odin2005]

21. I don't get why so many liberals adore this fucker.

He purposely used fear of inflation as a way to prevent full employment and thus suppress wages.

[invictus]

24. +1

[upi402]

25. My dad died months after he retired. A Volker wet dream! n/t

[laughingliberal]

27. I think the current admiration for him has more to do with the comparison with the rest of Obama's

economic team and not so much that he is any great New Dealer. He is better, by far, than Timmeh and the Lar. That's what I think you see here.

[JackDragna]

30. WORK MORE, LAZY PEONS!

I think it's not enough people should work until they're about 80 or so. I say, 80-hour work weeks as the norm! Child labor! Thank your corporate masters for giving you a job!