78-Year-Old Forced Out of Retirement Due to Cost of Living; America Celebrates

Last week, Corporate News hit a new level of incompetence, which is impressive, even for them. My local Disney-owned network’s local news broadcast featured a story about a 78-year-old man struggling to walk up three porch steps before delivering someone’s coffee. The person who ordered the coffee shared video footage from their front-door surveillance camera and started a GoFundMe for the nearly eighty-year-old. The story went viral. Eventually the old Door Dasher received over $1 million via GoFundMe.

Beautiful right? An act of kindness. No question. That’s where the story ended for the Corporate News. A tender moment between two Americans. Aw. How sweet. But that’s not the whole story.

Corporate News painted the unretiree as an American Hero for doing whatever he needs to do to make ends meet. DoorDash released a statement highlighting how this old American works twelve-hour shifts and has made over 6,000 deliveries. Cool, but is that what a retired senior citizen should be doing with their time? Whatever happened to working hard, paying taxes, being a decent citizen and relaxing in your Golden Years? Not in this country. At least not anymore. Fuck the American Dream. Pull up your bootstraps and get back to work. America has bills to pay.

America’s Fast Growing Working Class? Older Americans

Imagine working for forty or fifty years paying too much in taxes with the hope you’ll be able to spend your last few years on this planet peacefully, only being forced back to work because being alive is too expensive. That’s the reality for 41% of unretirees who state the rising cost of daily living is why they’re back to the grind. Shit, back in the day, retirees would get jobs as a hobby or to socialize. In today’s America? Nearly half of unretirees don’t have enough cash for basic necessities.

Workers aged 75 and older are the fastest-growing segment of the American workforce, projected to grow by 96.5% through 2030. Who’s looking forward to their 75^th birthday now? The participation in work for those 65-74 years of age is 30.2% and those 75 and older is 10.8%. In 2006, these numbers were 26.8% and 8.4%.

At least there’s government benefits. Ha! The average monthly benefit is approximately $2,071, while the average cost of living for a single senior in many states exceeds $3,000 when accounting for healthcare. Now benefits aren’t meant to entirely cover expenses, but the gap between payment and costs is growing. Because of this, seven percent of retirees have unretired over the past six months with the 48%-59% driven by finances rather than choice. So much for the right to choose.

Why is no reporter asking why a 78-year-old American was forced out of retirement for a low-wage job? Where is the digging? Questions? Research into these easy-to-find stats? Or simply asking why are Americans using our hard-earned money to pay for a retiree to unretire, who should be set on the money he, and his fellow American workers paid in taxes during their ‘labor years’? Isn’t that the promise or at least the social contract between American and government?

America’s Unretirement Crisis

Where do you find someone who receives information from a business and reports exactly as the business says without questions? America’s newsrooms.

Studies show that Americans’ confidence in the media is plummeting and hit a new low with 28% expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. With examples like the unretired delivery driver, is it really a wonder why no one trusts the Corporate News? Most of the time they only tell half the story.

Rather than highlight our current retirement and cost of living crises, Corporate News spun an American horror story into a Capitalist Fairytale. In what world is a fifteen years retired guy forced back to work a good thing? Instead, the People’s Freedom of Press runs the Corporation’s statement.

If only reporters and editors could critically think about the info they receive instead of just regurgitating it. Are they reporters or parrots in power suits? The worst part? This is just one terrifying example of the Corporate News painting a narrative. Call it Capitalist Spin or a lack of critical thinking either way it is utter incompetence.

What Kind of Country Doesn’t Take Care of its Elders?

What kind of society celebrates a 78-year-old man coming out of his fifteen-year retirement to work a minimum wage-delivery job because he can’t afford to stay retired?

The United States of America.

The numbers paint a depressing picture of American retirement. The more digging I do, the more certain I am that I will never be able to retire. I’m not alone in that either. Perhaps we should talk about it? Why aren’t more people protesting in the streets? It makes no sense.

Retirement is going extinct. By not talking about America’s retirement crisis, we’re putting off the problem until we decide to retire. By then, it will be too late.