What would it take to fix retirement?
The Indicator from Planet Money
NPR
4.7 • 9.5K Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2024
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Economist Teresa Ghilarducci says she has a plan that could fix retirement in America. In her book, "Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy," she proposes a few policies that she believes can help Americans currently struggling to retire. Today on the show, we talk to her about her ideas and why the current status quo is more serious than we think.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | NPR. Last year, Theresa Gilarducci came across this news story out of Cumberland, Maryland that just kind of made her want to cry. |
| 0:19.0 | It's supposed to be a feel-good story about a younger man who went to a Walmart and he saw a 80 year old |
| 0:27.3 | clerk who seemed a little bit creaky and so he started asking questions about |
| 0:32.0 | why he wasn't retired and the guy said well I |
| 0:34.6 | just don't have enough money to retire. This younger customer is so moved by |
| 0:39.2 | that he goes on Tik-talk and says to, hey, let's raise some money for this guy |
| 0:44.0 | so we can finally retire. |
| 0:46.0 | He created a go-fund meet page, |
| 0:47.8 | and in a few days he managed to collect more than $100,000. |
| 0:52.4 | Whoa, yeah, and here's that younger guy on DC's local Fox News station |
| 0:57.5 | standing outside Walmart, handing the older guy a giant check. |
| 1:01.5 | For $108,682 and 85 cents. |
| 1:08.0 | Wow. Love you man. I love you. |
| 1:12.0 | It's a sweet story, but that's not the reason it made Theresa emotional. |
| 1:16.5 | The guy got to retire, but if we depend upon that as our retirement system, |
| 1:22.1 | we would need 72 million go-fund me accounts almost every year. |
| 1:27.0 | This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong. |
| 1:32.0 | And I'm Adrian Ma |
| 1:33.3 | Teresa is an economist at the new school and she's author of a new book called Work |
| 1:38.2 | Retire repeat the uncertainty of retirement in the new economy. |
| 1:43.0 | Today on the show, she explains why the problem is more serious than we may even think. |
| 1:49.0 | We've built a system that kind of depends upon this isolation and this desperation at the end of life. |
... |
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