Cheney Urges Americans to Save More

Vice President Dick Cheney speaks, Thursday, March 2, 2006, to the 2006 National Summit on Retirement Savings being held in Washington. The Summit focused on the challenges faced by a broad spectrum of Americans in planning and saving for retirement. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)

You've got to love this one. From Yahoo News:

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney urged Americans Thursday to do a better job of saving and challenged policymakers to strengthen pensions and fix
Social Security to help people in their golden years.

"The American dream begins with saving money and that should begin on the very first day of work," Cheney told a conference here exploring how to encourage people to boost savings and be better prepared for retirement.

Too often, workers are living paycheck to paycheck and are not saving sufficiently, Cheney said.

Last year, Americans' personal savings rate dropped to its lowest point since the Great Depression. The dismal state of savings comes as a big wave of baby boomers will soon start retiring.

That wave of retirees will eventually put massive strains on government resources as people draw on Social Security and Medicare benefits, Cheney said. Fewer workers, meanwhile, can be counted on to help bankroll the retirement program.

"With an aging population, and a steadily falling ratio of workers to retirees, the system is on a course to eventual bankruptcy," the vice president said.

Okay. Now remember this previous post on personal income?

Personal incomes rose a solid 0.7 percent in January. That reflected solid wage growth during the month and a number of special factors, including a 4.1 percent cost-of-living increase for Social Security recipients and the start of the government's new prescription drug benefit.

Without the special factors, personal income would have risen a smaller 0.4 percent in January.

In other words, American worker's income has risen by only 0.4 percent--taking out the Social Security COLA increases. That is not a very solid wage gain--certainly not to be socking away into retirement savings accounts that Cheney is advocating. Mr. Vice President, American workers are stuck living from paycheck to paycheck. Instead of extolling meaningless advice, what are you going to do about it?

And while we're at it Mr. Vice President, check out this little statistic off a Yahoo News story, titled Weekly Jobless Claims Post an Increase:

The Labor Department reported that 294,000 Americans filed for jobless benefits, up by 15,000 from the previous week.

Government analysts attributed part of last week's increase to problems adjusting the raw data for normal seasonal variations in February, a month when the filings can be affected by snow storms and holidays.

The increase of 15,000 pushed jobless claims to their highest level in two weeks. The four-week moving average for jobless claims rose slightly to 287,250 last week, up from 282,000 in the previous week.