Pension planning (yawn ...) is a disaster.

• Author: Rundles, Jeff
• Position: Rundles Wrap-up

A LONG TIME AGO, IN THE LATE 1950S WHEN I WAS JUST a little boy in short pants, there was a Sunday when the whole country, dressed in their finest go-to-church clothes, went to their local elementary school and everybody ate the sugar-cube polio vaccine. Polio, a devastating disease, was then the scourge of humanity, rich and poor, black and white, and Dr. Jonas Salk had figured out a relatively inexpensive and unobtrusive way of protecting most people in the country. We had a national problem, we got together on a national solution, and we pretty much wiped out polio. It was amazing.

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I can't think of anything in the ensuing 50 years that quite captures that same sense of national crisis--and a bold, national, across-every-racial-and-social-gap-of-the-day response.

Until now.

This crisis is not a physical disease, yet it is an affliction so pervasive that it could have an even greater negative impact on the nation at large and every person in it than polio ever did or could. And I think we need a national day when we all get dressed up and come together on a national shared plan.

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The problem: The vast majority of Americans, young and old, well off and poor and middle class, have so little set aside for retirement and old age that our financial system might well collapse under the weight of destitute seniors.

Yes, I'm talking about pension planning.

I know, I know. Pause here for a yawn. Now, go get two toothpicks and prop open your eyes and read on.

I'm 54 years old, my pension preparation has been abysmal at best, and I am probably better off than 70 percent of my peers. In our parents' day, company-sponsored pension programs covered a ton of people, and Social Security did basically what it was designed to do: be a stop-gap and a safety net.

But the Baby Boomer generation now just reaching retirement age by and large hasn't been the beneficiary of pension plans. This group has seen what pension plans it did have turned over to a federal pension guarantee program pitifully short of assets. This group hasn't saved, and it was late in the game embracing such private plans as IRAs and 401 (k)s. The younger people behind us have 401(k) plans, but they are under-funding them to an enormous degree in the mistaken, but not unusual, belief that retirement is too far off to worry about.

I know it's been said a gazillion times, but any 54-year-old will rightly...