Work Until You Die: Lifelong Labor Becomes New Normal

WebInvestigator.KK.org - by F. Kaskais

(Eric Pfeiffer) For a growing number of Americans, there may never be such a thing as real retirement.

“The market is filled with people who are petrified of the idea of retiring because they might not have the funding to afford retirement,” Goalinvestor.com’s Melissa Doran Rayer, whose company provides financial planning services and created a data chart to show how retirement trends are shifting, told Yahoo News in a recent interview.

From 1990 to 2010, the percentage of workers 65 and older staying in the job market rose for both women (from 28.2 to 43.8 percent) and men (52.5 to 65.3 percent).

Interestingly, those trends have occurred in the 35-plus years since the Revenue Act of 1978 was passed, allowing workers to invest tax-deferred savings in 401(k) plans.

There have also been broad cutbacks to pensions across the U.S. A recent analysis found that more than 20 million American workers…

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Why Congress doesn’t work: Lawmakers’ avoidance of accountability undermines self-government | TAC

…We’ve moved away from that agreement over the past 100 years, but the experiment in self-governance is not over. It has only been interrupted.

The Late 20th Century Western Lifestyle Isn’t Going To Be Around Much Longer | Mark Steyn / Investors.com

The Eurovision Song Contest doesn’t get a lot of attention in the United States, but on the Continent it’s long been seen as the perfect Euro-metaphor.

Years before the euro came along, it was the prototype pan-European institution, and predicated on the same assumptions. Eurovision took the national cultures that produced Mozart, Vivaldi and Debussy, and in return gave us “Boom-Bang-A-Bang” (winner, 1969), “Ding-Ding-A-Dong” (winner, 1975) and “Diggi-Loo-Diggi-Ley” (winner, 1984).

The euro took the mark, the lira and the franc, and merged them to create the “Boom-Bang-A-Bang” of currencies.

How will it all end? One recalls the 1990 Eurovision finals in Zagreb: “Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra,” cooed the hostess, Helga Vlahovi?. “The string section and the wood section all sit together.”

Shortly thereafter, the wood section began ethnically cleansing the dressing rooms, while the string section rampaged through the brass section pillaging their instruments and severing their genitals. Indeed, the charming Miss Vlahovic herself was forced into a sudden career shift and spent the next few years as Croatian TV’s head of “war information” programming.

8 Personal Finance Lessons from Benjamin Franklin | Art of Manliness

via The Art of Manliness, by Brett & Kate McKay on February 15, 2012

Benjamin Franklin rose from 17-year-old runaway to successful printer, newspaperman, author, inventor, diplomat, and statesman. His great success came from living the virtues of frugality and industry, and his life offers us many personal finance lessons that apply to modern men just as much as they did to those living in colonial America. So without further ado, let’s dive right into uncovering some of Ben’s timeless wisdom.

1. Understand the True Value of Things