Baby boomers' retirement planning

So I'm watching CNN: Poppy Harlow is reporting on the fact that the first wave of baby boomers will be turning 65 and retiring in large numbers in 2011 - and the ramifications of that fact.  Her report notes that the boomers are in for some serious economic pain in the form of a substantially reduced standard of living, and states that the baby boomers have "failed" to plan properly and effectively for retirement.  Consequently, the report concludes, many boomers will have to work throughout their retirement.  The implication is clear: the boomers are up the brown, runny creek, and they're there because they screwed up.

If you don't know Poppy Harlow, she is a pretty blonde who just may be as old as 30.  She's a pretty decent reporter.  Now, with wisdom born of her great age and depth of financial and life experience, she criticizes her parents' (or grandparents?) generation for failing to plan enough and save enough to take care of themselves as they age.  In the interest of painting a broader and more accurate picture of the boomers' current situtation, allow me to mention a few economic trends that all of the boomers' saving and planning couldn't have accounted for:

• the burgeoning cost of their children's educations;
• the cost of their parents' long term care and medical expenses;
• the loss of whole classes of well-paying jobs, through offshoring and/or corporate downsizings that had the effect of purging older, better paid workers and replacing them with the very generation of children that boomers raised and educated;
• the systematic elimination of employer-provided health insurance;
• the ever increasing costs of private health insurance and medical and dental care;
• the systematic evisceration of corporate retirement programs; and
• the impact of the recession on boomers' investment and retirement accounts.

With all due respect, Poppy Harlow, walk a decade or two in the boomers' shoes before you conclude that they are responsible for the economic pain they may be facing in retirement.  Stop blaming the boomers, and start looking at the great risk shift* engineered by corporate America and the legislators it has bought and paid for, not to mention the "bubble and bust" economy created by our virtually unregulated financial institutions.

*   For more information, try reading Jacob S. Hacker's The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream.