As the National Car careens down the Fiscal Highway, pessimism runs rampant. Most of us ordinary folks in the backseat assume that we won’t be able to retire. Ever. We speculate about potential jobs for aging, disappointed, and testy workers. Suffice it to say that in the future, you will want to stand back wherever hot beverages are being served.

As a single woman with no kids (a spinster), I am due for a pretty bleak existence as I get older, researchers tell me. I keep seeing these reports, but I never feel as if they’re talking about me. Who are these people they’re talking about?

“The genius of the [Social Security] system is that it has lasted so well and so long,” Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton noted recently. But the system was designed for yesterday’s workforce . . . and women are the losers.

By Eleanor Foa Dienstag

What would FDR’s Secretary of Labor do now, we wondered, in terms of the shrinking labor force, the diminished power of unions, and other ills?

By Kathleen Rogers

The “new normal” economic asceticism we are experiencing will take some adjustment on our part, given the excesses of our past.

By Patricia Yarberry Allen, M.D.

Women continue to be underrepresented in the most powerful positions in our society. Recent research underscores the fact that this situation shows no sign of getting better.

By Diane Vacca

The super committee has failed to reach a debt-reduction deal, pretty much as expected. So where do we go from here?

By Janet Golden

So what exactly is in this Affordable Care Act, and how do you get accurate information about the phase-in of benefits? And what provisions directly affect women over 40?

By Diane Vacca

In “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) exposes the ways that millionaires use the social safety net as a luxury hammock.

WVFC’s Diane Vacca reports that that “Occupy Wall Street” includes people of all ages and backgrounds—including contingent after contingent of energetic, outspoken women in their 60s and 70s.

By Diane Vacca

When S&P made its announcement last Friday after the American markets closed, howls of protest screeched out of Washington.

By Diane Vacca

“This proposal is a stealth attack on the economic security of older women,” said Joan Entmacher, vice president for family economic security at the National Women’s Law Center.

Today is Equal Pay Day — a way to address the fact that U.S. women still make 77 cents for each dollar that men earn. Here’s Lilly Ledbetter, from an Equal Pay Day two years ago, talking about how her fight against Goodyear Tire Co. taught her that we still need to keep fighting for this.

By Diane Vacca

Under the “Path to Prosperity” budget proposed by Paul Ryan, chair of the House Budget Committee, who is it that prospers?

By Chris Lombardi

Tomorrow, March 29, the Court will hear oral arguments in this antidiscrimination case, whose class includes more than a million women. The stakes could hardly be higher.