new study from the Economic Policy Institute sounds the alarm over the impending retirement crisis, demonstrating how unevenly retirement fund gains have been distributed since the 401(K) displaced traditional pension plans. This, the study argues, has increased inequality.

If you just look at the surface, you'd think retirees would be doing great, because the average size of retirement accounts has grown since the 1990s, and has recovered from the bubble bursting in 2000. Additionally, aggregate saving and household net worth as a percentage of income are rebounding some since the great recession began in 2008. But, and it's a big but,



Retirement insecurity has worsened for most Americans as retirement wealth has become more unequal. For many groups, the typical (50th-percentile, or median) household has no savings in retirement accounts and balances are low even when focusing only on households with savings. Retirement savings are characterized by large differences between mean and median values because mean savings are skewed by large balances at the top.

This is what it looks like:

A smaller share of the population is enjoying all those gains, while (predictably) the middle class and lower income people—particularly minorities—are seeing shrinking income, shrinking net worth, and basically no ability to save for retirement. What's more, the percentage of workers participating in any kind of employer-based retirement plans has declined in the last 20 years, across all age groups. So recent and near-retirees have less in savings, and upcoming generations of retirees will be in the same boat.

This is precisely why, instead of cutting Social Security, Congress and the White House need to be focusing on how to strengthen it to increase benefits, to make sure that the program fulfills the original mission of the program: to save the nation's elderly and disabled from poverty.

Join Daily Kos and CREDO in telling the Senate to support the Harkin and Begich plans to strengthen Social Security.