In the Akron area and around the country, Americans are delaying retirement to save a few more dollars, pay down debt or maintain health care, or because their assets were trashed in the stock and housing market crashes.
So if young people are frustrated by the inability to find a job, they can place some of the blame on about 3 million people over the age of 65. That’s about how many more work beyond the age 65 than did 10 years ago.
The implications are profound. There is an abundance of people looking for work, thus allowing employers to offer less in wages and benefits — including the retirement benefits that encourage people to leave the work force.
Today the Beacon Journal offers its third set of vignettes showing how people have been affected by the worst economic decline since the Great Depression and how that has divided us.
Reporter Kim Hone-McMahan interviewed six people with different stories to tell.
Offered confidentiality, they shared details that show how the deep recession and personal experiences have affected dreams of a happy and healthy retirement.
The vignettes represent the first portion of the Beacon Journal’s 2012 America Today project, which explores the issues contributing to the heightening sense of incivility in the country.
The first two installments looked at housing and income and illustrated the same challenge: Our ideas about what went wrong vary widely.
At least one reader has asked: Where are the solutions in the series?
That’s part of the challenge — if we can’t agree on the problems, solutions are elusive. And if we can’t talk respectfully about the any of this, there is little hope of finding common ground.
Over the next several months, the Beacon Journal, University of Akron, the faith community and several organizations hope to launch conversations that respect our differences and move toward finding fixes.
If you want to offer your experiences and thoughts about solutions, join the online conversations at the end of each story, either by joining the moderated conversation at the Civic Commons, or the reader comments on Ohio.com.
In coming months, the newspaper will offer experiences about student debt, war, guns, crime and the changing family structure.
How have your thoughts and plans for retirement been affected by the economy? How do you react to these stories?
