why you cannot save your way to a comfortable retirement

I was very pleased to see this run in the New York Times. I guess it was safe because the writer didn't actually use the word socialism. But this Op-Ed is all about the dead-end of capitalism, choking the life out of the working person, and more recently, the middle class.

...we struggle with our personal finances not because we spend too much money on small luxuries but because salaries have stagnated at the same time as the costs of nonluxuries have gone up.

Even as the average household net worth plunged by almost 40 percent between 2007 and 2010, the cost of everything from health care to housing has risen for decades at rates well beyond that of inflation. Almost half of us are living paycheck to paycheck, barely able to save a penny.

In fact, it’s long been known that the majority of bankruptcies result from health issues, job losses and fractured families, something no amount of cutting back can protect against.

One of the main reasons we need to borrow money is college loans. Our collective student loan debt is more than $1 trillion, a sum greater than both our credit card debt and our auto loans.

Cross-reference wmtc: what are people supposed to do? or, why we need socialism.