Question

Considering that a large percentage of the older adult population relies heavily on a Social Security check, with no other income or resources, should the Federal government be doing more to keep people over 50 from falling into poverty? How do we hold employers more accountable for workers over 50 and/or close to retirement?

Answer 1

As a welfare state, it is definitely the duty of the Federal government to help the older population to sustain themselves and ensure a minimum sustianable income to prevent a decline in their standard of living. To do this a course of action could be to introduce a universal pension based on the last drawn pay and this could be indexed to inflation. However funding such an inflation indexed pension might be difficult and so a national pension corpus could be built and then this corpus could be invested in infrastructure projects of developing countries providing the long term cash flow required.

The employers should also do more by making it mandatory for employees to invest and they themselves contributing to a government notified pension fund. This fund can then be used to pay pensions to retired employees. Also a certain part of the profit can be mandated by law to provide for retired employees as is the model followed for corporate social responsibility spending.