Wall Street endlessly gushes about retirement. Its TV commercials show how wonderful life will be in our golden years—when we are old, yet still healthy and wealthy enough to go hang-gliding every day. Meanwhile, out here in the real world, most working-age Americans don’t want to talk or even think about retirement. Often this is because they know they aren’t saving enough and probably will have to work until they drop dead.

Judging from the emails and comments I’m getting, Connecting the Dots readers are more financially sophisticated than the general public. You’ve probably prepared for retirement enough to live comfortably. If so, you are a small minority, though. Teresa Ghilarducci is a labor economist at The New School, specializing in retirement security. Here’s what she told the Washington Post last month. “There is no part of the country where the majority of middle-class older workers have adequate retirement savings to maintain their standard of living in their retirement.” Her research shows even high-income workers haven’t saved enough to fund comfortable retirements.

The circles in this chart show how much money people should be saving for retirement. The shortfall (the red part) is around 30% for all income levels. The green part of the circles is what Social Security provides. The program was never meant to be a full pension, and it clearly isn’t delivering one. Yet a majority of the age 65+ population depends on Social Security for at least half of its income.

Now, consider what John Mauldin wrote in Thoughts from the Frontline last weekend. The federal government’s unfunded 75-year liability for Social Security and Medicare combined is $46.7 trillion. So Americans aren’t saving enough for themselves, nor is the government saving on their behalf. And the Millennial generation, whose taxes Boomers and Gen-Xers will depend on, is not exactly off to a great career start.

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