does the article spell out what changed - by numbers - pre and post covid? Is 50% that much worse than before? Couldn't see the delta in the article, which renders it drivel for me.
I think the point is low wage earners in their 50’s losing their jobs due to Covid are not going to be rehired and will not be able to build up savings for 10 yrs leading up to 65. I think I know many folks living on 20k that would not consider themselves impoverished. They are in LCOL areas, some have paid off homes or subsidized senior housing and decent health.
I get the "point" but if you're going to say "now it's 50%!!!!" then at least you should say, previously it was 46%, or whatever the number was. Not stating the amount of the difference is bad writing, at best.
Completely agree that the article is poorly written in this respect. Here's the inference I make from the article and from other information I found.
The article says, "
A total of four million people potentially pushed into retirement before they are ready will increase old-age poverty..." So we just have to figure out what number raised by 4 million gets us to 50% of the demographic in question, in order to figure out the original percentage (before COVID).
Since the article refers to people "over 55" and is focused on people not retired yet (presumably not yet 66-67 which is the average retirement age), we can roughly say it pertains to people aged 55-64. Now, per wikipedia (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States), the number of people age 55-64 is just over 42 million. So, if the article is right that 4 million aged 55+ will be laid off due to COVID, and all of them get pushed into retirement too soon due to not being able to find another job, that's a little under 10% of the 42-million demographic.
This implies that the number of people in the given age bracket will rise from roughly 17 million to roughly 21 million, or from about 40% to 50%. That probably overstates the effect, because of the 4 million pushed into retirement earlier, some of those people would have been in the poor/near-poor category even without the COVID layoff (but those people will certainly be worse off after a layoff). So the real increase is likely more like 8% instead of 10%; but this gives us a general ballpark.
I agree that, as I believe another poster in this thread said, there is some clickbait going on in the article. It's arguably more alarming that 40% to 42% of the population would have been poor in their retirement even before COVID, than it is that COVID added another 8-10% to the figure. But focusing on COVID likely got more readers for the article.