When I'm Sixty-Four: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them

by Teresa Ghilarducci

A crisis is looming for baby boomers and anyone else who hopes to retire in the coming years. In When I'm Sixty-Four , Teresa Ghilarducci, the nation's leading authority on the economics of retirement, explains how to confront this crisis head-on, revealing the causes behind the increasingly precarious economics of old age in America and proposing a bold plan to guarantee retirement security for every working citizen.
Retirement is one of the hallmarks of a prosperous, civilized market economy. Yet in America today Social Security is on the ropes. Government and employers are dismantling pension security, forcing older people to work longer. The federal government spends billions in exemptions for 401(k)s and other voluntary retirement accounts, yet retirement savings for most workers is falling. Ghilarducci takes an unflinching look at the eroding economic structure of retirement in America--and what she finds is alarming. She exposes the failures of pension regulators and the false hopes of privatized Social Security. She tells the ugly truth about risky 401(k) plans, do-it-yourself retirement schemes, and companies like Enron that have left employees without any retirement savings. Ghilarducci puts forward a sweeping plan to revive the retirement-income system, a plan that will ensure that, after forty years of work, every American will receive 70 percent of their preretirement earnings, guaranteed for life. No other book makes such a persuasive case for overhauling the pension and Social Security system in order to provide older Americans with the financial stability they have earned and deserve.

Genres: Finance, Economics

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Teresa Ghilarducci is an economist, author, and labor economist, and retirement security expert. Her widely circulated New York Times op-ed "Our Ridiculous Approach to Retirement" brought attention to her fresh and comprehensive critique of the America way of provisioning for retirement. Her book, When I'm 64: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them, presents her cutting-edge policy recommendations for restructuring the United States’ deteriorating retirement income security system. Her book Labor’s Capital: The Economics and Politics of Employer Pensions won an Association of American Publishers award in 1992. For the past five years, she has served as a court appointed trustee of the $50 billion retiree health care fund for ford, GM, and Chrysler retirees. Before coming The New School she was a professor at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Ghilarducci was the 2006–08 Wurf Fellow at Harvard Law School; her research has been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, U.S. Department of Labor, Ford Foundation, and Retirement Research Foundation.

Reviews

[E · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bold plan to preserve retirement

For many Americans, the dream of a safe, secure retirement has become a cruel joke. Elderly people without pensions find themselves trying to squeeze by on Social Security as they work part time for minimum wage serving hamburgers or greeting customers at discount stores. Some have money saved, but the overall U.S. savings rate is way down. For most workers, reliable pensions are becoming a thing of the past, just as costs are rising. Pension expert Teresa Ghilarducci explains that Social Security is under threat, even though many retirees have no other source of income. What is to be done? At this point, Ghilarducci stops analyzing and starts recommending. Americans need a bold, new government program offering “Guaranteed Retirement Accounts” (GRAs). She asserts that – given a burst of radical change – this idea can provide safe, secure incomes for U.S. elders. getAbstract finds that even though some readers might dispute her political conclusions and the fine points of her alternative plan, Ghilarducci cares passionately about retirement policy and provokes a meaningful conversation for those who hope for a dignified retirement.

[Maryann Jorissen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a fan of this author and will continue to seek out her books. I struggled with this book though. The prose seemed repetitive with the main premises.

[Qwerty · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book more, but found it too technical and wonkish. I really liked the fact the author challenges the assumption that just because people are living longer that they necessarily should be working longer and spend fewer years in retirement. The author also makes an excellent argument about how Social Security is highly progressive, i.e., those with less income have a higher pecentage of their pre-retirement income replaced by Social Security than those at higher incomes. She further argues rather persuasively that the current 401k system has failed as a method of securing a decent retirement for most workers either because people don't save enough for retirement, withdraw funds prematurely from their retirement accounts, or make poor investment decisions. The author's solution is the creation of government retirement accounts and ending the preferential tax treatment of 401k accounts over pensions. Overall, some excellent policy arguments about pensions and the retirement system, but a tough slog of technical jargon, statistics, and numbers.

[Ellen]

Nice Beatles reference.

[Chelle she-her]

read it a while back and need to re-read.