If you really need a million dollars in addition to social security, I'm toast, and so are the vast majority of Americans, whether they saved or not

The coming retirement debacle

Additional money has to come from taxes on the rich.

That is not the tune Fox and Friends will sing.

Their lyrics will go, "It's all their fault, we can't reward irresponsibility, and America is broke, anyhow."

What will the Democrats say, who have said nothing for decades as American government policy made the plutocracy ever more fabulously rich while incomes of ordinary folks fell and their savings dried up and blew away, and now in a recession that has ended only for capitalists and the chief effect of which has been to wipe out the best-off segments of the manufacturing working class?

The truth is this: the concept of a do-it-yourself retirement was a fraud. 

It was a fraud because to expect people to save up enough money to see themselves through a 20- or 30-year retirement was a dubious proposition in the best of circumstances. 

It was a fraud because it allowed hustlers in the financial sector to prey on ordinary people with little knowledge of sophisticated financial instruments and schemes. 

And it was a fraud because the mainstream media, which increasingly relies on the advertising dollars of the personal finance industry, sold expensive lies to an unsuspecting public. 

When combined with stagnating salaries, rising expenses and a stock market that did not perform like Rumpelstilskin and spin straw into gold, do-it-yourself retirement was all but guaranteed to lead future generations of Americans to a financially insecure old age. 

And so it has.