The three-legged stool just lost a leg.

Although I share few political views with syndicated columnist Marie Cocco, she does write about some things that other columnists don't and that I find interesting and needful to be said. This coming Sunday, we'll probably run her column on how 401(k) plans may have a fatal flaw, based on a Government Accountability Office analysis.

I can't go too much into it here, because the release date for the column has not arrived, but I will say that we have to re-think our retirement strategy. That Gannett pension I was going to receive died the day Gannett sold The Herald-Dispatch to GateHouse. Even before Gannett handed over they keys to the front door, GateHouse came in and told us our pensions were history. It said Gannett would provide us with a lump sum for us to invest.

My sum was okay, but I was hoping for more. The GAO report mentions problems low-income people have with accumulating enough money for a retirement nest egg. Believe me, it's not so easy for supposedly middle class people, either. I remember in my younger days reading a MAD magazine article on how to know if you suffer from middle class poverty. It was funny then. It's not so funny now.

I'll have more after the column's release date. If you want to read the entire GAO report -- it's about 65 pages of a PDF file -- go here.

A few years ago, I wrote a news article that talked about the three-legged stool that people were supposed to rely on for retirement: Social Security, employer pension and personal savings. For more and more people, that second leg is gone. And given the strains on the system, that first leg might not be as sturdy as we have counted on.

At an editorial board meeting today, I said I and others like me might have to weigh our options and look for government jobs soon. I need to work for government long enough to qualify for one of those generous pensions. Private employers are getting out of the pension business, leaving government as one of the few offering pensions to relatively new workers.