Is there a retirement crisis?

Andrews Biggs and Sylvester Schieber argue that there isn't.  Their figures for retirement income include what workers saved for themselves, as well as what they'll receive from the government-mandated "retirement" program we call Social Security, in which a lot of money is taken from the worker throughout his career, not invested, and partially redistributed to him at below-market interest rates according to whatever Congress decides will garner the most votes.

We'll never know how much the workers could have saved for retirement without these career-long expropriations from their paychecks.  As is usual in this sort of analysis, the answer probably is that the more prudent among them would have saved a ton and invested it in a reasonably diverse portfolio, and had a fine nest-egg upon retirement, while the less prudent would have found that an uncaring and unjust society conspired against them to ensure that they either never saved or lost it all later.

So Social Security continues to redistribute money from ants to the grasshoppers, or (if you prefer) from the lucky to the unlucky, while nevertheless serving as a vehicle to transfer wealth from the needy to the wealthy, which you have to admit is a neat trick.  All it requires is selling the program as forcible retirement savings (which is what it takes to get votes to implement it) but administering it as a current subsidy of old retirees by young workers (which is what it takes to delay the day on which you acknowledge that it's flat broke, so that you'd be forced to discontinue it and take your political lumps).  This rhetorical gambit reminds me of how industrial society is simultaneously causing global warming and global cooling.  The important takeaway is:  the government must always intervene to prevent a catastrophe!  Unless, of course, voters decide to cut it out.