The rich retire at will. The rest of us . . . we’ll work ’til we drop. The right-wing denies it will cut Social Security. But then, there’s this:

America’s retirement age of 65 is “crazy,” BlackRock CEO says Story by Aimee Picchi, BLACKROCK, INC., © Bloomberg

With Americans living longer and spending more years in retirement, the nation’s changing demographics are “putting the U.S. retirement system under immense strain,” according to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink in his annual shareholder letter.

One way to fix it, he suggests, is for Americans to work longer before they head into retirement.

The backstory: “Rich” is a comparative term. A person owning $100 thousand would be rich if everyone else had $10,000, but that person would be poor if everyone else had $1 million. The income/wealth/power Gap is the key. The way to become richer is to accumulate more for yourself or to ensure that everyone else has less (i.e., widen the income/wealth/power Gap between you and those below you).

The very rich, who run America, have chosen both paths. They bribe politicians to carve out income tax breaks for themselves so they can accumulate more money, while they insist that everyone else pay more taxes to widen the Gap.

“No one should have to work longer than they want to.

But I do think it’s a bit crazy that our anchor idea for the right retirement age — 65 years old — originates from the time of the Ottoman Empire,” Fink wrote in his 2024 letter, which largely focuses on the retirement crisis facing the U.S. and other nations as their populations age.

Rich man Fink begins with the pseudo-compassionate phrase, “No one should have to work longer than they want to.” He cluelessly forgets that our finances require many of us to work longer than want to. It’s the “Let ’em eat cake” syndrome. And what is Fink’s definition of the “retirement crisis facing the U.S.”?

Fink’s suggestions about addressing the nation’s retirement crisis come amid a debate about the future of Social Security, which will face a funding shortfall in less than a decade.

Some Republican lawmakers have proposed raising the retirement age for claiming Social Security benefits, arguing, like Fink, that because Americans live longer, they should work longer, too.

Suddenly, Fink’s claim that “No one should have to work longer than they want to” disappears. Now it’s, “If you live longer, you should work longer” — uh, except if you’re rich, in which case you can retire any time you damn well please. Money has its privileges.  This is based on the preposterous notion that the Monetarily Sovereign U.S. government is running short of its own sovereign currency — a currency it creates at will by simply pressing a few computer keys.

Ben Bernanke: “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”

Note that Mr. Fink’s implied claim of federal government poverty does not extend to setting a high minimum age for benefitting from tax shelters and other tax avoidance devices available to the rich. See: Ten Ways Billionaires Avoid Taxes on an Epic Scale (Read these and you’ll be shocked and angered at the desire to cut your Social Security benefits.)

For example, At least 18 billionaires received stimulus checks in 2020, because their tax returns placed them below the income cutoff ($150,000 for a married couple). Incredible, huh? How about this suggestion: Change the laws so that none of these “ways” would be available to anyone under the age of, say 85? Does that sound reasonable to protect our government from the phony insolvency the rich like to claim is imminent?

However, that ignores the reality of aging in the workplace, with the AARP finding in a 2022 survey that the majority of workers over 50 say they face ageism at work.

Many older Americans stop working before they plan to because of ill health or an unexpected job loss.

In fact, the median age of retirement in the U.S. is 62—even lower than the “traditional” retirement age of 65.

Did all those folks “want” to retire and live their remaining years in poverty? Fink must think so.

Fink is right in saying that the retirement system isn’t working for most households, noted retirement expert and New School of Research professor Teresa Ghilarducci told CBS MoneyWatch.

But his assessment that people should work longer misses the mark, she added.

“After a 40-year-old experiment of a voluntary, do-it-yourself-based pension system, half of workers have no easy way to save for retirement,” she said.

“And in rich nations, why isn’t age 65 a good target for most workers to stop working for someone else?”

She added, Working longer won’t get us out of this. Most people don’t retire when they want to, anyway.”

“Get us out of this?” What is the “this” we have to get out of? Social Security is a federal agency. No federal agency can run short of U.S. dollars unless that is what Congress and the President want. Congress, the White House, and SCOTUS all are federal agencies. Where are the fake “trust funds” that supposedly support (i.e. limit) them?

Alan Greenspan: “A government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency. There is nothing to prevent the federal government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody. The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print the money to do that.”

For you folks who have been indoctrinated with the twin false notions that . . .

1. Federal taxes fund federal spending, and
2. Money “printing” causes inflation,

. . . why aren’t you screaming about the benefits to the rich rather than “getting out of this” by cutting benefits to the non-rich?

To be sure, America’s retirement gap, or the gulf between what people need to fund their golden years versus what they’ve actually saved, isn’t new, nor is Social Security’s looming funding emergency.

Social Security doesn’t have a “funding emergency.” It has a fake emergency based on ignorance of Monetary Sovereignty and promulgated by stooges for the rich. There. Is. No. Funding. Emergency. Period. The U.S. government has infinite money. Even if the federal government didn’t collect a single penny in taxes, it still could continue funding Social Security and Medicare and everything else, forever. Federal taxes have two purposes, and neither of them is to fund federal spending:

1. To control the economy by taxing what the government wishes to limit (like your ability to acquire more wealth, unless you’re already wealthy) and
2. To assure demand for the U.S. dollar by requiring you to pay taxes in dollars.

   

There is a third, unofficial purpose.

3. To make you believe the Big Lie that federal benefits to you are “unsustainable” and imprudent. (Federal benefits to the rich are O.K., however)

Yet Fink’s comments are noteworthy because of his status as the head of the world’s largest asset manager, with more than $10 trillion in assets, including many retirement accounts.

Gee, you think that wealth affects his ‘Qu’ils mangent de la brioche’ attitude?

Of course, Fink has a vested interest in Americans boosting their retirement assets, given that his firm collects fees from those accounts.

And in his letter, he also promotes a new target-date fund from BlackRock called LifePath Paycheck, which will roll out in April.

“He’s steering the conversation toward BlackRock — and a lot of people who talk about Social Security reform on Wall Street want to privatize it in some manner and make money,” Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, an expert on Social Security, told CBS MoneyWatch.

Sure, privatize Social Security, so the rich, who never have enough, can have even more, thus widening the Gap. It’s already begun with the deceptive Medicare Advantage plans, which are being promulgated by the rich as a new way to make money off of Medicare.

For no financial reason whatsoever, Medicare only covers 80%, and doesn’t cover things like dental care, weight loss drugs, and many other health care services. So in step the rich, to provide what Medicare doesn’t, and thus make money: Medicare Advantage But there is a kicker. When you need something really expensive, you run into the Medicare prior authorization scam.  Gotcha! Yes, your $100 dental bill may be covered, but that $50,000 surgery will require you to jump through hoops, and even then you may not be covered. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. The profit motive in healthcare is ruthless and unnecessary.

To be sure, Fink also praises public policy success stories for addressing retirement savings, such as Australia’s system, which began in the early 1990s and requires employers to put a portion of a worker’s income into a fund.

Today, Australia has the world’s 54th largest population but the 4th largest retirement system, he noted.

That’s better than America’s system, but it still is divorced from reality. Australia’s government is Monetarily Sovereign. It could have an infinitely large retirement system without taking a penny from workers’ income. The U.S. could do the same.

“As a nation, we should do everything we can to make retirement investing more automatic for workers,” he noted.

Oh, how pious. Apparently, “everything we can” doesn’t include a federally funded Social Security benefit for every man, woman, and child in America. The rich already are able to self-fund such a plan, but have convinced the not-rich that we don’t deserve that kind of help from an infinitely wealthy government. Yeah, yeah, “too good to be true,” “it’s unsustainable,” “unaffordable,” “causes inflation,” “people won’t work if you give them benefits,” and all the other BS excuses the rich throw at you. In America, we have 70 million + suckers who believe the idiocy a proven liar like Donald Trump tells them, but scant few who believe actual facts about our government. We suckers don’t demand Social Security for All and Medicare for All. We argue against our own best interests. That’s what makes us suckers. By contrast, the rich never argue against their own best interests.

Fink, who was born in 1952, said that his generation has an obligation to help fix the nation’s retirement problems.

The financial insecurity facing younger Americans, such as millennials and Gen Z, are creating generations of disillusioned, anxious workers, he noted.

How noble of Fink. How will he “face his obligation”? By cutting your benefits.

“They believe my generation — the baby boomers — have focused on their own financial well-being to the detriment of who comes next. And in the case of retirement, they’re right,” Fink wrote.

He added, “And before my generation fully disappears from positions of corporate and political leadership, we have an obligation to change that.”

Oh, they’ll change it . . .  by applying leeches to cure our anemia. Sure, Mr. Fink, we suckers accept your premise that the best way to cure our lack of money is to take money from us. We believe it because it’s what everyone tells us, and we are too dense to understand reality. But don’t worry that any of us will see the irony in all that. For 25 years I’ve been preaching the idiocy of an infinitely wealthy government taking dollars from the populace, and what has that accomplished? Nada.

The vast majority still accept the obvious Big Lie that federal benefits are limited by federal taxes (except for benefits to the rich.) It never occurs to us that though federal deficits have grown from 40 Billion in 1940 to 32 Trillion in 2023, we still believe deficit spending is unsustainable, unaffordable, and will cause the sky to fall. We follow that up by laughing at the stupid public, except we are the stupid public. (If life is like a poker game, and you’ve been playing for a while, but don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.)

Boomer (and older) lawmakers and politicians often don’t see eye-to-eye on how to fix the retirement crisis.

But failing to fix the issue damages not only the retirements of individual Americans, but the country’s collective belief in the future of the U.S., Fink noted.

“We risk becoming a country where people keep their money under the mattress and their dreams bottled up in their bedroom,” he noted.

How true. I just turned 89 and am growing weary of telling you not to answer Emails from Nigeria, not to touch hot stoves, not to tell strangers your Social Security number, and not to believe a government that created the U.S. dollar from thin air can become insolvent. This blog has posted more than 3,000 articles, most of which make two fundamental points.

1. The U.S. government can afford anything, without collecting money from you.
2. If you’re not screaming like hell at the Big Lie, if you’re not demanding that your politicians tell you the truth, you deserve what you get.

Or do nothing and let the rich continue to screw you. Rodger Malcolm Mitchell Monetary Sovereignty Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY