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To the editor:

The headline, "Americans' savings habits leaves little for retirement” (The Chief, July 25), and the Associated Press article that follows, give the false impression that workers' bad financial decisions lead to poverty in their senior years. Consider how little many workers are paid nowadays. If you tell them they don't know how to handle money, they'll probably have an Alice Kramden response: "Of course not. I've never had any practice."

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. But even in New York City, it's only $16.50 an hour. You need to get paid a lot more than that to climb out of poverty.

So having state governments run an auto-IRA program to take money out of paychecks to fund retirement accounts is not helpful if workers need the money for current essentials. What about workers who make so little that they're living in homeless shelters? Should they be planning for a homeless retirement?

The article states "Private contractors administer the investment funds, which can fluctuate with financial markets." In other words, your funds are at the mercy of the stock market and you can wind up with less.

I guess strengthening Social Security would be too humane and sensible. How about employers paying workers good salaries so workers would actually have enough money to save? But if Amazon's Jeff Bezos did that, he might have only half as many billions of dollars.

Richard Warren