Here are several “big picture” retirement themes I expect to hear more of in the coming year. I’ll come back later in the month with a post on personal retirement tactics.
Recent posts tagged ‘economy’
The current economic recovery is weak, but that’s hardly news. There are many explanations for this meager improvement, but perhaps one of the most telling is a large jump in personal savings in the United States.
I can’t sing a lick, but a tune from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific came to mind as I was thinking about the pervasive pessimism in so much economic and market commentary.
My recent post on the government’s fiscal outlook generated several thoughtful comments.
Two readers mentioned Paul Krugman’s op-ed on Social Security in The New York Times. It is true, as Krugman points out, that Social Security is only a modest part of the fiscal problem. Using statistics from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), federal spending on health programs and Social Security is expected to grow from 10% of GDP to 16% over the next quarter century. About 1% of that growth is due to Social Security, according to CBO; the other 5% is due to health programs.
The long-term budget outlook for the federal government is bleak. What is surprising is that this is considered news.
The forces driving the U.S.’s long-term budget problem have been known for decades. We’ve also known for years that sometime in this decade, the outlook would begin to worsen considerably. And now it has. And no, the deteriorating fiscal situation has little to do with stimulus spending, bank or auto bailouts, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.