EDITORIAL: Decisions about retirement come quickly
If the finances of midtown Toronto residents are like those of other Canadians, 80 percent of us do not have pension plans at work.
Most of us will be forced to struggle along in retirement on savings — if any — plus small CPP benefits. When the TV ad asks, “Is your house your retirement plan?”, many of us are tempted to yell in desperation, “Yes!”, and then hope that house prices don’t fall.
The pension crunch is an increasingly serious problem for our economy for at least two reasons: 1. Baby boomers are already hitting retirement age, producing record demands on pension funds. 2. The economy of the past 30 years has not grown for the middle class, whose real wages have been stagnant or fallen. Opportunities for these so-called boomers to save money for retirement dried up for them.
Political solutions floated to fix the problem have ranged from hiking taxes to increasing pension benefits to finding ways to cut benefits, neither extreme being very popular.
A fraction of those with adequate pension plans — namely, public and unionized employees — are being singled out as having to give up some of their benefits.
This is no solution, of course, but rather scapegoating. Instead of trying to bring them down to the level of the rest of us, we need to find ways to raise us all up.
We have to ask ourselves: as a supposedly fair and caring society, how can we provide for all our fellow citizens once their hardworking days are over?
