Retirement's Unraveling Safety Net -WP

[Rose Siding]

MIDDLE RIVER, Md. -- If it's a clear morning, you can count on seeing 80-year-old Junior K. Paugh strolling streets that tell his life story..../....He never is short of money, thanks to Social Security and his company pension that will last as long as he does. Health care costs him next to nothing, thanks to Medicare and retiree health insurance. His Baltimore County home is long paid for, thanks in part to a below-market price of $4,400, a result of wartime subsidies for defense-related housing construction.

"I feel completely secure," says Paugh, no small triumph for the third of 13 children born to farmers in Depression-era Appalachia. The triumph is not only his but also the country's -- the fulfillment of a New Deal vision of cradle-to-grave security, underwritten by the federal government and large industrial employers.

That vision is being supplanted by one President Bush calls the Ownership Society, in which the burdens of economic security -- and, the president hopes, the rewards -- shift back to individuals. Social Security is only one aspect of the shift. The safety net big companies wove for Paugh's generation -- long-term employment, pension security, retiree health insurance -- has been giving way for so long that its unraveling is mere background accompaniment to Washington's noisy debate over Social Security. But in the lives of most middle-class families, it stays in the foreground, inseparable from the Social Security discussion.

This becomes clear in the company of Junior Paugh, his three children, all in their fifties, and five grandchildren, ages 18 to 35. Their three-generation journey has taken them from Appalachia to suburbia, from government relief to an assembly line to a management track at Sears. Yet, despite the apparent progress, their expectations are sinking: The grandchildren, all three generations agree, have it worse than their parents and grandparents -- most dramatically in their prospects for retirement, when all gains and losses come home to roost.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/14/AR2005051400515.html