The number of labor force participants over age 65 has increased about 22 percent in the past three years.

My Comment: I have to confess to a “Duh” moment when I saw this headline. My plans for retirement went out the window starting sometime in 2008. Not that I had any real plans to start with; just that the stars I had carefully aligned at that point began to drift uncontrollably. The net effect was to keep working.

I’m very fortunate in that I’m engaged in something I do well and in something that I enjoy. And I have a degree of good health that doesn’t interfere. For the most part. There are others who were sick and tired of what they were doing and are now forced to either do something for which they are not suited or simply scale back so far they have lost much of their reason for getting up in the morning.

Many of them will vote for Romney this fall. For me, this is simply rewarding someone for bad behavior. The notion that any one person or group of people is responsible for the “great recession” is too simplistic. The forces at work across this country and across the world are too complex to be attributable that way. But to let the fox back in the henhouse because he has a nice smile is simply cutting your own throat and being surprised by the outcome.

By Paula Aven Gladych

Many individuals who thought they would be able to retire when they reached age 65 are reconsidering because of the economic downturn and a sudden realization that they haven’t saved enough to live comfortably in retirement.

Retirement used to be an age-driven event, but now people are thinking about it from the perspective of, “Can I afford to retire,” said Joe Ready, director of Wells Fargo Institutional Retirement and Trust. In a recent survey of middle class people, those who make less than $100,000 a year, 25 percent of respondents said they would have to work until age 80 to be able to afford retirement.

“We always knew that three out of four people would work in retirement, but working until age 80 is very much a sea change,” Ready said.