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Originally posted by Sidd Finch
Spoken like a true 25-year old. You'd be a lot less sanguine if you were 70 and lost 30% of the money you depended on to provide a bare minimum of support.
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spoken like a true 25 year old, because most 25 year olds I know (most 30-somethings, too, myself included), don't think there will be any meaningful SS benefit for them at all when they retire, so they are already planning to depend entirely on market returns for their retirement. That's all water under the bridge for many X-ers and younger. The real concern is that, before we retire and get nothing, we will have the shit taxed out of us to provide for boomers, eliminating to some extent our ability to save enough to cover our own asses.
I think the Dems, incidentally, are making a mistake by focusing on the AARP-set to battle Bush's proposals. They risk really pissing off the younger voters (including some of the younger boomers) who are very aware that, whatever is done or isn't done w/r/t retirement benefits, they are probably going to be left holding the bag, not the current oldsters and probably not most of the boomers. Being seen to do something (anything), offering some (any) solution for consideration & debate, is far better than claiming nothing is wrong and slamming opposing party attempts to come up with something. Personally, though I think Bush II has been shockingly fiscally irresponsible, this admin's willingness to actually propose SS ideas is winning grudging appreciation from me. I'm not sold on PSRs, by any means, but then again, from my p.o.v., just about anything they try can't work out much worse than the status quo. Unless PSRs somehow fuck the market up for the rest of us (not an unreal possibility), since I don't feel I have anything to lose I'd just as soon see them tried as nothing - and nothing is pretty much what has been proposed by the Dems ('cause there's no problem, you see - decades of claiming that there was a looming SS crisis that Rs didn't care about because they hate the working poor, and all it took to magically solve the problem was an R proposal to fix it!). Anyhow, Dems should fight PSRs on the merits by all means, but they need to recognize that the people at risk are not current near retirees, it is the relatively young, who are fully aware that they are fucked, and are very willing to hear all arguments on how to get un-fucked, and are likely to feel some fondness for & possible loyalty to anyone actively trying to get them un-fucked.
And, for clarification's sake, I do only give a shit about what the effect of any plan will be on me. Current old people & near retirees can go fuck themselves. They are the richest quintile of the population, they voted for Regan (twice), and if they blew all their money on SUVs and monster houses expecting to be able to suck off the public teat when their income dried up, well they can just fuck off and die old, alone and eating cat food. Of course, we also know that I am the queen of the "fuck the oldsters" routine.
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Cite, please. Most people in this country perform miserably in saving money,
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Although the low savings rates for americans are somewhat overstated - "savings" as defined in those international comparisons doesn't include money invested (for instance - your Schwab account or your 401(k)), or equity in one's house (speaking of bubbles), and those figures are much higher for Americans than just about anyone else. I believe the usual "savings" definition used even excludes the money market account that I consider to be my "savings" account which, in my case for instance, would mean that while I believe I have something north of $150K socked away in various kinds of "savings," I would register a big ol' 0 in terms of my official savings rate. Those investment-style savings Americans favor also have (historically) higher rates of return than traditional "savings," so Americans, arguably, don't need to save as much as, say, the Japanese or Europeans, who earn much lower returns on their savings.
Er, that was just an aside, relevant to nothing in particular.
