I’m reading pieces like this from all over the advanced world lately.

(Time magazine did a good cover story on the topic a few weeks ago.)

Personally, as a person who doesn’t play golf, isn’t very gregarious, and gets antsy if I’m not doing something, preferably for pay, I don’t much care. If you were old and retired any time in the past 30 years, though, you hit the sweet spot. It’ll never be like that again, except for a lucky few.

…Most of whom will have had government jobs. In the matter of retirement & pensions, until recently there wasn’t much difference between private-sector and gumment workers. Now there seems to be a gulf opening up. Lots of gumment workers (I know, I know, not all, but lots) are still looking at gold-plated retirement packages; very few private-sector workers are. Be interesting to see what social & political tensions this generates in years to come.

Might we, for example, see “yuppie flight” from areas where property and sales taxes are jacked up to pay for extravagant public-sector pensions, to the degree that younger working people get fed up with the burden and move to newer communities without those overheads? If so, who would then pay for the pensions?

Perhaps we shall all end up working for the gumment. That seems to be the way things are going — socialism triumphant at last. Certainly the current administration has made great strides in that direction…