Remember the days when people retired in their fifties and sixties? Or their seventies? That’s a distant memory today. In another sign of just how bad our nation is treating the working class – a new study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute shows that most Americans today will have to work until they’re 80 – just to have a chance at saving enough for retirement. The study found that the lowest fifth of Americans income-wise will have to work until they’re 84 years old to be able to retire.

The news isn’t much better for those who make roughly $31,000 a year either – they – on average – will not be able to retire until they are 76 years old. And in both cases – working that deep into old age will only give the average person a fifty-fifty chance at having enough money to live off of until they die. In 2009 – 17% of Americans older than age 65 were still grinding it out in the workforce. They say you can tell a lot about a nation by the way it treats its young and its elderly. And in that context, Republicans are trying to take food assistance off the table for poverty-stricken children – and trying to privatize Medicare for seniors.

Welcome to the United States – a nation of 80-year-old bricklayers, burger-flippers, and Wal-Mart workers.