In A Broken Country, Americans Are Taught To Blame Themselves

The retirement crisis is just one example

If there’s something wrong, it’s your fault.

That should probably replace “In God We Trust” on the currency.

The biggest danger Trump might present isn’t his pathetic nature and actions themselves, but the scapegoat he provides for the American people. His delusion and destruction have planted the not-so-subtle seed that—once he’s gone—somebody else will come along and save the country. The sad reality is that the country was broken long before Trump’s narcissism and infantilism took control. He’s opportunistically pouring salt in the long-open wound of a failing experiment.

Trump no longer window dresses what the United States of America is and has long forced its people to become—a nation of individualists. A classic brainwashing tactic of the American establishment is to place an adjective such as rugged in front of individualists to make it sound somehow righteous. Just like when they describe the working class from places like Chicago and Buffalo as “proud” or “tough as nails.”

You’re placed into this every man, woman, and child for themselves society and systematically beaten down at every turn, but you’re rugged, proud, and tough through it all. At least you have something—and, with it, you can overcome any challenge and be whoever and whatever you want to be.

That’s the runaway American dream.

Long-time readers recall how I have characterized the so-called retirement crisis in the United States.

If you’re forced to work in retirement, you’re destined to stock shelves in a grocery store.

Not that there’s anything wrong with stocking shelves in a grocery store. But it just comes down to having choice in the matter.

You have a better shot at having choice in the matter, the sooner you acknowledge and embrace the reality that you’ll Never Retire and, subsequently, start planning for it.

However, the retirement establishment offers scant helpful advice—let alone realistic, concrete solutions—to deal with the issue.

The government routinely changes rules around tax-deferred retirement accounts.

Not helpful for large swaths of people who haven’t saved enough.

The financial media and retirement planners default to save more.

Not helpful for people with income, cost of living, and other objective or self-inflicted constraints.

Instead, all of the above look at the person with $50,000, $100,000 or much, much less saved—nowhere near that traditional retirement magic number of $1 million—and imply, or at least suggest, that the individual did something wrong

You’re to blame. You’re deficient. You’re less than. You made a mistake.

Blows my mind how our society tends to take clearly collective problems—not just around retirement and saving money—and frame them as individual failures.

The retirement crisis is nothing more than one clean example to pull from a dirty mess.

Millions of people arrived at middle age or retirement age with nowhere near enough money saved. The response from the retirement industry wasn’t to ask whether the system itself was broken. It was to ask what these individuals did wrong.

Did they start early enough?

Did they buy too much coffee?

The possibility that housing costs exploded, pensions disappeared, healthcare became unaffordable, wages stagnated, and entire generations were forced to navigate a fundamentally different economic reality barely enters the discussion.

The system never gets scrutinized. The individual always does.

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