A man who spent forty years at the tool and die plant poured his coffee on the last day and looked at his garden with total peace. He knew exactly what was coming in the mail. That certainty is gone.
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News for the America we remember |
I remember sitting at my grandfather's kitchen table back in 1983. He had just finished forty years at the tool and die plant. He wasn't a rich man by any stretch of the imagination. He wore the same flannel shirts for a decade and drove a Ford that smelled like stale tobacco and motor oil. But that morning, he poured a cup of black coffee and looked out at his garden with a look of total peace. He knew exactly what was coming in the mail every month. He didn't have to check a ticker tape or wait for the evening news to see if he could afford his heating bill. |
Back then, we talked about retirement as a three-legged stool. It was a simple piece of furniture, but it held up. The first leg was Social Security. The second was a company pension, a reward for staying loyal to one outfit for half your life. The third leg was your own personal savings, usually tucked away in a passbook account at the local savings and loan. If one leg was a little short, the other two kept you from tipping over. It was a fair deal for a hard day's work. |
Somewhere along the way, we decided to saw off those legs. We traded the stool for a high-wire act. Today, most folks are told that their entire future depends on the whims of the stock market. We call it a 401(k), which sounds more like a tax form than a retirement plan, because that is exactly what it is. We took the risk away from the big corporations and shoved it onto the shoulders of the guy working the assembly line or the woman managing the department store. |
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I recall when Ronald Reagan talked about the shining city on a hill. Part of that vision was a sense of stability. You worked hard, you played by the rules, and you earned your rest. There was a dignity in knowing that after forty years of getting up at five in the morning, the company would take care of you. It wasn't charity. It was a deferred salary. You gave them your best years, and they gave you a steady check until the end. |
Now, retirement feels less like a finish line and more like a second job. Instead of relaxing on the porch, my friends are glued to their computer screens, watching red and green lines move up and down on a chart. If a war breaks out half a world away or a bank in New York makes a bad bet, a retiree in Ohio sees ten percent of his nest egg vanish in an afternoon. That isn't a reward for a lifetime of labor. That is a gamble. |
Most of us aren't stockbrokers. We are plumbers, teachers, and mechanics. My father didn't need to know what a price-to-earnings ratio was to know he could afford to take my mother out for a steak dinner once a week. The 401(k) was never meant to be the whole stool. It was supposed to be the third leg. But the pensions started disappearing in the late eighties and nineties. Companies realized it was cheaper to give you a matching contribution and a good luck handshake than to keep you on the books for twenty years after you stopped working. They saved a fortune, and we |
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