also do away with the income caps for IRAs. Let people save as much as they want!

What would help us is keeping the cap but doubling the amount and then indexing it to inflation. At that point, we'd need to raise our wages to a point working people could contribute something meaningful to it.

The way most companies used to (and some still) do it. Many of the corporations (Boeing for example) that want to end a traditional pension want to raise the SS eligibility age to 70.

... sounded good to my wife's (now passed) father, but guess what? When the steel company he was a middle manager for got bought through typical financial machinations that are commonplace today, his pension was mostly dissolved. (I believe there was a bankruptcy involved but as I am sure you know, companies routinely are allowed to declare themselves bankrupt even though they are not broke at all)

Remember how the Republicans made bankruptcy harder for individuals? They didn't do the same for corporations.

Most likely your father in-law's pension went to shareholder dividends or the CEO's bonus.

... as far as I can tell, bankruptcy for a corp is easier than ever.

The events I described happened back in the late 80s, when this sort of financial skullduggery was just taking hold.

And health insurance should not either. You shouldn't have to stick with an employer you don't like just to keep the pension or insurance.

You may not be able to collect them till you're a certain age but in theory they're supposed to be there when you retire.

Healthcare on the other hand has been a benefit that you're employer supplies only while they employ you.

Normally five years. So if you work for someone for three years and leave you will receive no pension benefits at any age. A lot of people move around from job to job and they would not get any benefits.

.... so I'd prefer not to speculate.

Right now, today, 90% of Americans are set to retire (if they ever actually do) below the poverty level.

Why have these programs been such a failure? There are some obvious reasons, stock market crashes in 2000 and 2008 that wiped out huge amounts of holdings (another one coming any year now, bank on it), failure to actually contribute the amounts necessary to the fund to cover retirement income for a reasonable lifespan, what else?????

I quit contributing because the whole model of tax deferment assumes you will be spending a lot less when you retire and that the income tax rate will be commensurately lower, both dubious assumptions at best.

past almost all workers had good pensions.

That's just not true. I don't know the exact numbers, but at best around 50% of employees were ever covered by a pension. As has already been pointed out they take years to vest. It used to be ten years, but in the very late 70's that was changed to five years. Which still means that if you leave before the vesting period is up, you lose whatever amount the company has put in, although you get to keep your own contribution.

Plus, a lot of those pensions aren't all that generous. I worked for ten years (1969-1979)for airlines that eventually became USAir. I was vested in their pension plan, and when I finally started taking it this past August when I turned 65, it's all of $172.31/month. It's better than nothing, but it's not very much. Social Security is a vastly better deal.

Nonetheless, companies with some minimum number of employees (25? 50? someone else can figure that out) should probably be required to have a pension plan and should not be allowed to underfund it. That's the biggest thing.

City and state governments have gotten away with underfunding their pension obligations, and there's going to be hell to pay at some point in the foreseeable future. It's not just Detroit. I can recall reading articles at least as far back as the 1980's (and I'm thinking I was seeing them the decade before) that unfunded public pensions were a ticking time bomb.

Allow employers to contribute up to 10% of wages pre-tax to employee's IRAs. Make a 3% contribution the default unless employee opts out. Allow employees to contribute up to 20% to pre or post tax IRAs.

Employers should pay wages. They should not be in the benefits business.