Time to pay the piper, but not to despair

I see where a growing number of companies are suspending or reducing contributions to their employees' 401(k)s and, of course, that makes millions of Americans worried about whether they'll have enough dollars in their retirement funds to allow them to retire instead of ending up 72 years old and punching up lottery tickets from behind the counter at the Royal Farms store.

Several educated and intelligent people tell me they are no longer reading the newspapers or watching the networks because they can't stand the constant drumbeat of bleak economic news like this. They don't even look at their 401(k)s. What's the point? Like most of this big mess, there doesn't seem to be much any of us can do about it.

We've been headed down this road for a long time - houses purchased by people who could not afford them, homeowners using their equity as ATMs, credit extended to anyone who had room for one more slice of plastic in their wallets, Bush's tax cuts and Bush's costly war, companies constantly shipping jobs overseas, Wall Street demanding more and more growth and profits, banks and other institutions getting deeper into "exotic financial instruments," deregulation and no regulation, stagnant wages and the increased costs of health care, food and energy, and the graying of the American population.

We knew something was wrong with the picture even as it was being drawn.

The Bush administration pushed for tax cuts and predicted budget surpluses, but gave us nothing but deficits, not to mention debt from unfunded mandates, Social Security and Medicare, that have grown into the trillions of dollars.

"People kept living longer, and they kept saving less," James Fallows wrote in The Atlantic three years ago. "Increased longevity is a tremendous human achievement but a fiscal challenge - as in any household where people outlive their savings."

I read the Fallows essay - a prescient description of what the crash might look like, written as a theoretical "look back from 2016" - while on vacation in Mexico in the summer of 2005. All around me were happy Americans, swimming in the hotel pool and the surf, enjoying food and drink almost 24-7, this fun in the sun certainly financed on credit for the majority because, well, that's how we did things over the past 20 years.