retirement

What's the plan to protect continuing income for hard-working public and private employees when they retire? Preserve Social Security? Strengthen pension plans? Well, according to a Wisconsin State Journal article examining the future of the Wisconsin Retirement System, the plan of choice among some conservatives appears to be: Drop dead.

From the article:

Steve Stanek, spokesman for the libertarian Heartland Institute in Chicago. "My retirement plan is to be at my computer and fall over dead."

(Cross-posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog. More than 96,000 people in Wisconsin receive Social Security and thousands more are nearing retirement.)

Monday’s stock market disaster, with the Dow plummeting 778 points—a larger drop than after the Sept. 11 attacks—may make Wall Street traders and billionaire hedge fund investors hyperventilate.

But imagine how much worse for the rest of us it would have been if, three years ago, President Bush and Sen. John McCain had succeeded in their efforts to privatize Social Security, gambling in the stock market funds that have been a guaranteed income for America’s retirees?

Many of our 401(k)s and pension plans took a hit yesterday—but no matter how our individual retirements fare on Wall Street, we would still have Social Security to back us up.

Not so if McCain became president.