No Retirement: Misled Baby Boomers May Die at the Office

Thursday, February 23, 2012 – by Staff Report, Daily Bell

For boomers, it's a new era of 'work til you drop.' When Paula Symons joined the U.S. workforce in 1972, typewriters in her office clacked nonstop, people answered the telephones and the hot new technology revolutionizing communication was the fax machine. Symons, fresh out of college, entered this brave new world thinking she'd do pretty much what her parents' generation did: Work for just one or two companies over about 45 years before bidding farewell to co-workers at a retirement party and heading off into her sunset years with a pension. Forty years into that run, the 60-year-old communications specialist for a Wisconsin- based insurance company has worked more than a half-dozen jobs. She's been laid off, downsized and seen the pension disappear with only a few thousand dollars accrued when it was frozen. So, five years from the age when people once retired, she laughs when she describes her future plans. "I'll probably just work until I drop," she says, a sentiment expressed, with varying degrees of humor, by numerous members of her age group. – AP
Dominant Social Theme: Too bad for the baby boomers! They shoulda invested better.
Free-Market Analysis: There are 78 million boomers, and apparently they are not going to retire. Does anybody notice an irony in this?
The dominant social theme of retirement has been one of the most pervasive of all elite memes. Never has any group of people been subject to more propaganda in the history of humankind, in our view.

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