The golden age of retirement has past. Our retirement system is woefully under funded to deliver the level of economic welfare that many people expect from it. In this Policy Brief, we show that continuing down our current path in regard to retirement policy has the potential to reduce standards of living for large segments of our population. While this analysis does not explore the range of distributional implications that are associated with its conclusions, it begins the process of explaining why we need to rethink the policies that had come to fruition at the end of the twentieth century.