On October 3, 2013, Bruce Shutan writes in Employee Benefit News:
“Employees really are struggling with their feelings of financial security. The percent that rate themselves as being financially secure has actually dropped since 2011,” says Barbara Nash, Unum’s Vice President of Corporate Research.
Of significant import for employers, Unum’s survey of 1,890 U.S. adults, conducted by Harris Interactive, found that the expected retirement age of U.S. workers now averages 67.1. Respondents reported that they had pushed back their retirement an average of 2.6 years from what they had expected five years ago. Their need to bolster their financial position and manage expenses was the key reason behind the change in retirement intentions. These concerns are understandable; one in two employees do not believe they have enough savings to cover lost income if they are sidelined by illness or injury.
It’s great to be retired if you can afford it.
But the plain truth is that more than four in five older Americans expect to keep working during their latter years, a sign that traditional retirement is out of reach for vast swaths of society, according to a new survey.
Among Americans ages 50 and older who currently have jobs, 82 percent expect to work in some form during retirement, according to the poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
In other words, “retirement” is increasingly becoming a misnomer.
“The survey illuminates an important shift in Americans’ attitudes toward work, aging and retirement,” said Trevor Tompson, Director of the AP-NORC Center. “Retirement is not only coming later in life, it no longer represents a complete exit from the workforce.”
For those who have been dependent on employment and/or welfare, the problem is that financially sustainable retirement is and will no longer be a reality. Even with Social Security, which is funded through payroll taxes called the Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax (FICA) and/or Self Employed Contributions Act Tax, (SECA), one must have had a job to be eligible for the entitlement––and the amount of Social Security is based on the income level generated from one’s employment record of payroll tax contributions.
For solutions see http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=10470.
One should ask what form would the structural reforms take. Employment in this new enlightened age would start at the time one enters the economic world as a labor worker, to become increasingly a productive capital owner, and at some point to retire as a labor worker and continue to participate in production and to earn income as a productive capital asset owner until the day you die. As a substitute for inheritance and gift taxes, a transfer tax would be imposed on the recipients whose asset holdings exceeded $1 million. This would encourage those owning concentrations of productive capital assets (effectively the 1 to 10 percent) to spread out their monopoly-sized estates to all members of their family, friends, servants and workers who helped create their fortunes, teachers, health workers, police, other public servants, military veterans, artists, the poor and the disabled.
Other stipulations for the structural reform would entail structuring a more just and simple tax system. The tax rate would be a single rate for all incomes from all sources above defined personal exemption levels so that the budget could be balanced automatically and even allow the government to pay off the growing unsustainable long-term debt. For example, a family of four would be provided an exemption of $100,000 to meet their ordinary living needs. The poor would pay the first dollar over their exemption levels as would the hedge fund operator and others now earning billions of dollars from capital gains, dividends, interest, rents and other property incomes. This would include the elimination of all tax loopholes and subsidies.
There would be tax policy to incentivize corporations to pay out all profits to their owners as taxable personal incomes to avoid paying stiff corporate income taxes and to finance their growth by issuing new full-dividend payout shares for broad-based individualized employee and citizen ownership with full-voting rights.
The payroll tax on workers and their employers would be eliminated, but all promises for Social Security, Medicare, Medicare, government pensions, health, education, rent and subsistence vouchers for the poor would be paid out of general revenues until their new jobs and ownership accumulations provide new incomes to substitute for the taxpayer dollars to fill these needs.
The structural reform policies would direct the Federal Reserve to create an asset-backed currency that could enable every man, woman and child to establish a Capital Homestead Account or “CHA” (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to acquire a growing and diversified dividend-bearing stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income. The CHA would process an equal allocation of productive credit to EVERY citizen exclusively for purchasing full-dividend payout shares in companies needing funds for growing the economy and private sector jobs for local, national and global markets. The shares would be purchased on credit wholly backed by projected “future savings” in the form of new productive capital assets as well as the future marketable products and services produced by the newly added technology, renewable energy systems, plant, rentable space and infrastructure added to the economy. Risk of default on each stock acquisition interest-free loan would be covered by private sector capital credit risk insurance and reinsurance, but would not require citizens to reduce their funds for consumption to purchase shares.
The end result would be that citizens would become empowered as owners to meet their own consumption needs and government would become more dependent on economically independent citizens, thus reversing current global trends where all citizens will eventually become dependent for their economic well-being on our only legitimate monopoly –– the State –– and whatever elite controls the coercive powers of government to extract taxes, incur national debt and redistribute earnings from the productive sector.
For more on how to accomplish such structural reform, see “Financing Economic Growth With ‘FUTURE SAVINGS’: Solutions To Protect America From Economic Decline” at NationOfChange.org http://www.nationofchange.org/financing-future-economic-growth-future-savings-solutions-protect-america-economic-decline-137450624 and “The Income Solution To Slow Private Sector Job Growth” at http://www.nationofchange.org/income-solution-slow-private-sector-job-growth-1378041490.
Support the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797 and support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm. See the full Act at http://cesj.org/homestead/strategies/national/cha-full.pdf.
Also see “No Such Thing As Retirement? at http://www.aipnews.com/talk/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=22867&posts=6&start=1
