'General Motors, Sears and Toys R Us: Layoffs Across America Highlight Our Shredding Financial Safety Net' (nbcnews.com) 554
New submitter Bruce Henry shares a story: Today's aging workforce faces an uncertain future. The announcement this week that General Motors will lay off 15 percent of its salaried workforce and shutter multiple plants in North America was a sobering reminder of how far the American worker has fallen. Unlike most large private sector corporations today, thousands of employees at GM still enjoy some union benefits. The company has reportedly set aside $2 billion for layoffs and buyouts. It's not much, but it's something -- many workers, if they are laid off en masse, will be far less lucky. Some older Americans are lucky enough to have been grandfathered into generous pension plans and others hope social security and personal savings will be enough to sustain themselves. But for millions of younger people, the outlook is bleaker -- an ever-diminishing social safety net, with retirement dependent almost entirely on how well they manage savings. Two-thirds of millennials have nothing saved for retirement.
The private sector pension as we once knew it is all but dead. Public sector pensions, meanwhile, are under attack at the state level. "Companies don't offer pensions anymore. Social security, when it was established, was meant to be one leg of a stool," says Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "One leg would be the private pension through employment, a second leg personal savings, and a third leg social security. Social security is now the only source of income of a lot elderly have." What, if anything, are our politicians doing about this? Progressives rail against President Donald Trump, but real retirement security has not been a big enough part of the conversation on either side of the political spectrum. Millions of Americans are in danger of entering their final decades unable to afford ballooning medical bills and cost-of-living expenses. This is a huge problem, and one that liberals in particular should have capitalized on this election cycle.
The private sector pension as we once knew it is all but dead. Public sector pensions, meanwhile, are under attack at the state level. "Companies don't offer pensions anymore. Social security, when it was established, was meant to be one leg of a stool," says Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "One leg would be the private pension through employment, a second leg personal savings, and a third leg social security. Social security is now the only source of income of a lot elderly have." What, if anything, are our politicians doing about this? Progressives rail against President Donald Trump, but real retirement security has not been a big enough part of the conversation on either side of the political spectrum. Millions of Americans are in danger of entering their final decades unable to afford ballooning medical bills and cost-of-living expenses. This is a huge problem, and one that liberals in particular should have capitalized on this election cycle.
Responsibility != Blame (Score:4, Insightful)
It can only be your responsibility to provide for your financial safety. It seems many people misunderstand that word: "responsibility". It does not mean blame; it means you can't count on someone else to fix it. Sometime in your life, likely more than once, something financially horrible (and possibly horrible in other ways) is going to happen to you. It probably won't be your fault, but it will be your responsibility to carry on.
Shit's going to happen, so be as prepared as you can. For most of the time sine WWII, excepting the recent "great recession", six months expenses as savings would carry your through a layoff. Maintain medical insurance, and that amount will also see you through a medical catastrophe, or at least contain the debt to something manageable. Don't voluntarily take on debt and you've won half the battle.
If your under 50, don't expect social security to be worth enough to matter. Sucks, but yelling about it won't pay for your retirement. The younger you are, the more you'll get advantage from a 401K or IRA. Especially if you're in your 20s: sticking money away in a broad-based stock index fund and ignoring it for 40 years has amazing leverage, and that young you should plan on no useful assistance of any kind.
The lack of someone else providing you a safety net will suck. But you know that's how the world works, so plan accordingly, as best you can given your circumstances. You can't fix the overwhelming national debt ($178,000 per taxpayer!), but you can avoid carrying debt, and save what you can.
Re:Responsibility != Blame (Score:4, Insightful)
In Communist Europe we do safety nets collectively. It's not perfect but it's a hell of a lot better than what the US has.
Socialism FTW.
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In America we made different choices. We can fight about which choice is better (Merica!), but they're not going to change for anyone's convenience. So, reality being what it is, savings are a good thing. Heck, the only world in which savings are a mistake is on where you expect social collapse, either anarchy or the government seizing all your savings. Plenty of Americans are stocking up ammo instead of investments, but history says that's overly pessimistic.
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Savings are a good thing, but the majority of people can't save enough to pay for cancer treatment. More can afford to save up enough to cover periods of unemployment, but not all. And people at the bottom have far more to lose - if you are rich you probably won't lose your home, but if you are poor you may well do.
Socialism is insurance. Cheaper insurance than any commercial policy.
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In America, we linked unions to socialism, and we linked socialism to communism, we linked social security to socialism too, and so the whole thing became a political minefield. Safety nets became a bad thing as a consequence, everyone being told that if you can't make ends meet then you lacked personal responsibility (unless it's my grandma, she was just unlucky, but your grandma on the other hand is a burden on the system you commie).
Americans however are indeed saving money. We have economists that don
Re:Responsibility != Blame (Score:5, Insightful)
In the past, a single house hold earner could provide for a family. Now it takes two.
What's changed? THAT'S what we need to look at. ...
Increased consumer materialism.
Yup, we wanted more stuff. Oh, sure, there's also been some added income inequality quite recently, but the 1950s was a long time ago. We want each kid to have his own room. We want each adult to have a car. We take color TV, an electric refrigerator, a dishwasher, and a washing machine for granted. Back when "single house hold earner could provide for a family" those were all considered luxuries to be aspired to. And it's not like this is frivolous stuff, but we have raised our expectations and there's a cost to that.
Anyway, which do you (you the generic slashdot reader, not sycodon specifically) have control over: the unfair income distribution in the US, or the amount that you. personally, save? Which can you personally fix, and which can you only shout about on the internet? Not that you have to pick one, of course, do both! But shouting "life is unfair" on the internet is not a retirement plan. It is really easy, though, and doesn't require sacrifice to make it happen, so it's a distraction from the hard thing you know you need to do. We humans like our distractions.
I think you're misunderstanding something (Score:3)
You're actions don't take place in a vacuum. The Phrase "Pulling up by your bootstraps" used to be an ironic jab at wealth inequality and the general unfairness of the world. It describes a literal
Re:Responsibility != Blame (Score:4, Interesting)
Stuffing a dollar under your mattress in 1920 and pulling it out in 1965, it has lost roughly half it's value. Stuff a dollar under your mattress in 1965 and take it out in 2010, it has lost 85% of its value.
Guess when we went off the gold standard? Trick question; we actually went off the gold standard under FDR when he made it illegal for Americans to own gold, so that they couldn't redeem the notes that the government was no longer actually backing with gold (this is a thing that actually happened). But we admitted we were no longer on the gold standard in the 60s.
The standard savings vehicle for most Americans for a long time was a savings account at a bank. It kept up with and exceeded inflation in many cases netting very modest but real gains. Now they must gamble on the stock market with their money to stay above inflation, despite record low inflation rates for much of the early part of this decade.
Beyond a few month's savings for emergency, loaning money to banks is just a bad plan. A savings account has never been a way to stay ahead of inflation - that's not what it's for. Ownership of the means of production, via some broad-based index fund, takes the purchasing power of the dollar out of the picture. Year-by-year the stock market is effectively random, but over multiple decades it's dependable. It gets harder when you near retirement, as you need bonds (though own your house outright by then), but at that point you'll have something worth talking to a financial advisor about.
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Take the time to understand the math behind Merton's portfolio problem.. Interestingly, this is a solved mathematical problem, if you can give your utility curve. Basically, volatility sucks when you need money every month. For the same reason that dollar cost averaging is awesome when you're first investing, withdrawing a fixed amount every month from a volatile source is a terrible idea. [wikipedia.org]
But, unless you're swimming in money relative to your needs, a stock allocation lower than 50% is just a horrible idea.
If you have a way to decide when the market is low, and draw from bonds when the market is low and from stocks when i
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my grandfather supported 12 kids bought a house and bought a new car off the lot every 3 years till the 80's on a factory income. What changed is employers stopped paying in line with increases in inflation
What changed is: those factories went out of business. GM, Chysler, most steel in the US, bankruptcies across the board. Mostly due to pension costs.
tend to get involved in things that harm their bottom line, like expect them to not dump industrial waste into the water supply.
When's the last time the US lit a river on fire? That sort of thing has gotten better over the decades, not worse.
The lord can make you tumble
The lord can make you turn
The lord can make you overflow
But the lord can't make you burn
Burn on, big river, burn on
Burn on, big river, burn on
Surprisingly that was just 50 years ago, but it was shocking then, not expected as it was 120 years ago.
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In the past, a single house hold earner could provide for a family. Now it takes two.
What's changed? THAT'S what we need to look at.
I suspect it will be a mix of increased costs due to:
Government regulations and their impact on manufacturers. Industry practices...required because they can. fees surcharges, penalties, etc. Increased consumer materialism. You HAVE to have the big screen TV, you HAVE to have that 4 wheeler, new car, etc.
More people in the work force.
Nonsense arguments (Score:5, Interesting)
In the past, a single house hold earner could provide for a family. Now it takes two.
Median household income in the US is around $44K per year. Given that most people manage to get by just fine obviously that is more than enough to provide for a family. No it won't by you a house in Beverly Hills but it's plenty enough to put food on the table and take care of necessities.
Government regulations and their impact on manufacturers.
I work in manufacturing and have made my career there. Your argument that government regulations have much to do with the problems in manufacturing highlights the fact that you don't know much about the economics of manufacturing. Manufacturing is doing just fine in the US. The US manufacturing sector is worth about $3 TRILLION annually which by itself would be among the 6 largest economies in the world. What has changed in the US is that wages have risen to among the highest in the world so all the labor intensive manufacturing left for places with low labor costs. Capital intensive manufacturing has remained because the US has the lowest cost of capital in the world. Government regulations are if anything helping by keeping cost of capital low.
The only major problem US manufacturing has right now is we have an idiot president (and cronies) who think that raising the cost of everything we buy is somehow going to magically going to benefit us. Tariffs will solve no problem that currently exists in manufacturing. They will not bring manufacturing jobs to the US (actually the opposite is what will happen) and they will not force China to play nice.
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Women entered the workforce.
When you basically double the number of workers, don't expect wages to increase.
I think you've got that wrong. What we can consume as a nation is more-or-less what we can produce as a nation. If twice as many people work, we should end up with twice as many goods and services. And our standard of living has gone up far more than 2x since the 50s.
One person working will buy far more now than in the 50s, it's just that it's less than what we've become accustomed to in the past 60-odd years.
Also, people waste tons of money on gadgets that they didn't have in 1960.
Sure, but we also expect medical care based on an MRI instead of guesswork, and a car that has s
It degenerates into liberal v conservative (Score:2)
Now you just need to sling mud and make it impossible to tell sincerity from hypocrisy.
We are going back to Middle Ages and serfdom. Glad I will not live long enough to suffer in that era.
Everyone is completely exempt from personal respon (Score:5, Insightful)
FTA: with retirement dependent almost entirely on how well they manage savings. Two-thirds of millennials have nothing saved for retirement..... Social security, when it was established, was meant to be one leg of a stool," says Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "One leg would be the private pension through employment, a second leg personal savings, and a third leg social security. Social security is now the only source of income of a lot elderly have."
Everyone is completely bereft of personal responsibility? In the richest country in the history of the world, people can not be held responsible for their own future? They can be excused because they have to have the latest big-screen LED and Iphone? Fun fact: A high school student working less that 20 hours a week at minimum wage makes more than 90% of the rest of humanity.
As someone who has not been responsible with 401k savings, I can attest that it is not the rest of the country that is responsible for my retirement, and I do not care to hand more power over to clueless politicians and bureaucrats, which they will just use to garner more power. History has clearly shown they will badly mishandle any money that are given. Thank you, but no. Keep your so-called social security. I'll worry about me and mine.
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Most Americans don't earn enough to pay for food, housing, medical care, and save for retirement. Maybe we should pay our workforce better, then we could talk about personal responsibility.
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Most Americans don't earn enough to pay for food, housing, medical care, and save for retirement. Maybe we should pay our workforce better, then we could talk about personal responsibility.
No, most Americans earn more than enough for those things. They don't earn enough to eat out multiple times each week, live in a larger house than they can really afford, have the latest big screen TV, nice cars where they can barely afford the payment, the latest iPhone, and save for retirement.
In other words, they need to learn how to delay gratification and live a lower lifestyle.
I used to listen to Dave Ramsey for 20 minutes every day when I went to get my kids from school. The folks who called him wi
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Re:Everyone is completely exempt from personal res (Score:5, Interesting)
A colleague from Germany was visiting our office recently. He was quite perplexed as to why on a lunch walk we all were discussing the stock market. Basically everyone has to be both investor and worker here. Over there there is a reasonable pension system and people focus on their jobs.
It is also clear from various lunch walks with well educated co-workers that steady investing is beyond the grasp of many otherwise smart and rational people. Some want to have "my guy" handle their stuff (cue Berny Madoff flashbacks), others have been on the sidelines waiting for prices to be "right" while insisting they are not timing the market (they are). It is saddening that this is where we expect most folks to draw their retirement from.
So while I don't suggest there should not be a system with zero responsibility, the current system is akin tossing baby seals into a shark tank and wishing them the best. I would like to see an expansion of social security to help fill the gap that has widened into a chasm between what people need and what they have to retire at a reasonable age.
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Why is steady investing beyond the grasp of smart and rational people?
My friends often say I am too rational in all the things I do and decisions I make, but when I graduated from college 8 years ago I simply saw the benefit of cheap index funds and started funneling my money into my 401k, Roth IRA, and HSA, maxing them out every year. Now it's 8 years later and I am 30 and I have about 400K in my accounts.
To me it couldn't have been simpler and I rarely look at or talk about the stock market.
You were lucky (Score:3)
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But it's not about how much I have now. This is retirement savings that I can't really touch. It's about how much I'll have in another 32 years or so when I retire.
It's about long term investing over a 40 year time period. Even I let you pick any 2 dates 40 years apart as a starting and ending date to be investing into retirement type accounts what's the worst that someone could have done if they maxed out their accounts for 40 years? Sure some date ranges would do worse than others, but if you pick any
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Everyone is completely bereft of personal responsibility? In the richest country in the history of the world, people can not be held responsible for their own future? They can be excused because they have to have the latest big-screen LED and Iphone? Fun fact: A high school student working less that 20 hours a week at minimum wage makes more than 90% of the rest of humanity.
Making wide sweeping assumptions about prolific consumer spending correlating with failure to save undermines your argument.
Every generation in all times and all places has had conspicuous spenders. They do so in order to, among other things, get attention. That that sliver of the population is going to be in money trouble at the end of their life is both unsurprising and unimportant.
The 20 year-old in the cafe with the fancy phone may well be more frugal than you, because that phone is a birthday gift fr
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FTA: with retirement dependent almost entirely on how well they manage savings.
The people who seem to have the happiest retirements never managed their savings. They just managed to work for the government until they retire. Double points if you are in the "life and safety" group like police and fire and retire at 55 with full everything.
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Everyone is completely bereft of personal responsibility? In the richest country in the history of the world, people can not be held responsible for their own future? They can be excused because they have to have the latest big-screen LED and Iphone?
How about because their wife got very sick, they needed to pay for child care for all their kids for years, and of course all the other many expenses involved in losing the other parent's help, plus they tried to actually be responsible and pay all the bills, including the medical bills?
Asking for friend ...
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Anyone planning on relying on Social Security is an idiot. This includes my own mother, who spent her adult years as a real estate agent, and put nothing away. Now, she gets a monthly check for about $900, and since she recently had to go into a nursing home on Medicaid, they're taking 90% of that to pay her expenses since she can't afford the ~$40k/year it normally costs.
There's no excuse for not maxing out what your company will match in your 401k unless you're living well below the poverty line. And,
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So she should have saved all her money and then paid it to the nursing home instead of enjoying it? I don't think this example is an argument for saving more.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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You do realize that BLS doesn't utilize any homeless figures, and it does produce the U-6 figure you mentioned. What it does do is attempt to figure out who is no longer looking for work, so they set up a well published explanation of their methodology. So how is the US playing slight of hand?...or did you mean the media, who's doing the reporting of unemployment?
To be fair from one year to the next, you need to compare apples to apples. BLS also supplies that information https://www.bls.gov/ [bls.gov] no "slight
Ha! Good one there, have another? (Score:3)
This is a huge problem, and one that liberals in particular should have capitalized on this election cycle.
Indeed, they should have capitalized on it. But we're talking about the party that lost the white house to the man who is arguably the least qualified politician since the dawn of our democracy. The democrats are practically synonymous with "pulling failure from the jaws of victory". Being as truth doesn't get votes any more, they ended up pretty much where we expected - they now control one half of one third of the government.
GM Delayed Announcement (Score:2)
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I wonder what Trump had to promise GM for them to delay the announcement until after the election?
What's hilarious about this is the fact that Obama actually bailed them out and threw a huge bone to the union in the process. But I guess since a Democrat did it it's cool.
Just to make your head explode if it hasn't already, Donald Trump was on the record as being pro-gay-marriage. Obama ran on a platform against gay marriage.
Re:GM Delayed Announcement (Score:4, Informative)
In any case GM was done - no money to retool to build stuff people wanted. Obama gave them a pile of money but insisted basically they pay Union workers to do something. It was either sit on their hand and do nothing or build products that might not sell in the existing plants. Bascially it was failing business before and its failing business now.
No factual documentation backs up anything you've said.
On December 19, 2008, President Bush agreed to a $24.9 billion bailout using TARP: $13.4 billion for GM, $5.5 billion for Chrysler, and $5 billion for GMAC.
In response, the companies promised to fast-track development of energy-efficient vehicles and consolidate operations. GM and Ford agreed to streamline the number of brands they produced. The United Automobile Workers union agreed to accept delayed contributions to a health trust fund for retirees. It also agreed to reduce payments to laid-off workers. The three CEOs agreed to work for $1 a year and sell their corporate jets.
and
The Obama administration used the take-over to set new auto efficiency standards. That improved air quality and forced U.S. automakers to be more competitive against Japanese and German firms.
In other words, the plan was set in motion by Bush, not Obama. And Obama added terms to the deal that required the automakers to up their game, not "pay union workers to do something".
https://www.thebalance.com/aut... [thebalance.com]
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Good point it was Bush, and that parasite Hank P. Obama just doubled down, on the stupid and made them build cars people would want even less.
No, it was primarily Bush.
The only problem with Biden’s history lesson is that the “man with steel in his spine” he referred to should have been George W. Bush, not Barack Obama. Lest we forget, it was Bush rather than Obama who initiated the government rescue of the auto companies.
https://www.newyorker.com/news... [newyorker.com]
The only thing Obama didn't do is step and and completely quash the bailout. Obama publicly supported the plan before he was elected, but the plan itself was the brainchild of the previous administration. An incoming president isn't going to kill a plan that's saving tens of thousands of American jobs. If you really blame Obama for that you aren't being honest with yourself.
Note the perspective of that article is that Biden is trying to give Obama
Waive (Score:3, Insightful)
You wanna help retirees? Waive the damned property taxes.
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All taxes are the bain of humanity. States and local govt's have run amok in terms of establishing revenue sources to pay for pension benefits for retirees.
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"You wanna help retirees? Waive the damned property taxes."
Sounds good until all property is owned by "retirees" and schools are not funded. The money has to come from somewhere if you want schools, roads, military, police, etc.
Yeah let's pretend to care about this now (Score:3)
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Who did this to us? (Score:2)
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Political bias alert in summary! (Score:3)
The conclusion that this problem is one "that liberals in particular should have capitalized on this election cycle" tells me all I need to know about the political views of the original poster.
That said? Yeah, we have some looming problems for future retirees when it comes to finances. But the people who are already nearly 30 years old and "have nothing saved for retirement" still need to look in the mirror to find who to blame. I can guarantee you (because I work with a lot of these people myself), a lot of younger people were never taught much of anything about finances and investing. Many have no idea how to balance a checkbook, and rely on regularly logging in to their bank's web site to determine how much money they've got in their account(s). They couldn't challenge their bank about an error if they had to. They just blindly trust and accept that the bank is keeping a proper record of their transactions. They've been offered 401Ks but opted out, saying they "didn't trust that the money would really be there by the time they retire anyway" or other such excuses.
The fact that many people are struggling to find and keep good paying jobs obviously doesn't help either. But the fact is, it's a lot easier to have money taken out of your paycheck, pre-tax, before you ever see it. The bellyaching about not being able to afford to let them take even 3% or 4% out for a retirement account is just FUD. If you're living SO close to the edge that 3% of your income, pre-tax, will make the difference between you surviving and not? You have bigger problems and need to re-evaluate your life choices and needs.
Personally, as a libertarian who leans financially conservative on most issues? I think it's the liberal Democrats who I'm most afraid to see trying to "fix retirement problems". They're notorious for the persistent belief that any problem can be addressed by pointing the finger at someone else with more resources, and demanding they give some of theirs up towards the goal.
When you look at how the existing Social Security system is set up? It's not even really a designated "pot" that funds go into. That's why so many other political plans involve dipping into money that was supposedly earmarked for people's retirement. Even SSI comes out of Social Security. That's a potential problem because disability payments are doled out to a lot of people who never worked long enough to contribute anything meaningful IN to the system first. And our legislation allows for practically anything imaginable to count as a disability, if you can get the right doctor to sign off on it. I once dated a girl, briefly, who was in her 20's and I discovered was collecting disability payments. I couldn't imagine why, until I found out she claimed she had "back problems" that prevented her from ever being able to hold a job. It turns out, it was some kind of issue where occasionally (maybe once a month at most?) she'd find she couldn't get up out of bed in the morning ... basically paralyzed for a while. A few hours later, it would get better and she could get up and move around again. A legitimate medical problem? Yeah, but IMO, hardly one that would keep you from being a productive member of society. Especially with all the teleworking opportunities around today, it's a better time than ever in history to find employment despite a limitation like that! A tenant in my father's apartment, a while back, was collecting disability payments because he claimed his previous cocaine addiction qualified him. You could even collect it for being too overweight, if you wanted to go that route .... How much more money would be there to ensure Social Security could pay people fairly in their retirement if it wasn't drained off by these other things?
Re:Paying people to not work (Score:5, Insightful)
It is interesting to watch people that are one minor accident or treatable chronic disease away from having to face reality.
Re:Paying people to not work (Score:5, Informative)
You forgot one thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
What do people do when they don't have the money they need?
They turn to crime. Then they get arrested and put in jail, where tax money pays for all of their needs. Also, higher crime rates creates a whole hosts of costs that ultimately come out of your pocket, including more tax money for law enforcement and higher insurance premiums in the impacted industries.
They aren't going to conveniently just lay down and die, so, you, as the tax payer, will pay for their needs one way or the other.
We are in a situation where the jobs that pay are in short supply, and the jobs that are available do not pay enough for people to both live on and save for retirement. This is great for the people at the top, who get way more money than they would have if they had to cover the costs of pensions and livable wages...but it is a nightmare for everyone else (and no, it is NOT POSSIBLE for everyone to be at the top).
So, your dismissive attitude will only allow the problem to get worse, and you will be impacted by the consequences, one way or another.
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What do people do when they don't have the money they need?
They turn to crime.
TFA is about retirement funds. How many granny gangs have mugged you lately?
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Social Security pays out less than you paid in until you reach around age 81. The average person lives until 78.
But doesn't that figure factor in people dying very young too?
Shouldn't we really be looking at the average lifespan only of people who are actually able to start taking social security?
Then we would see if the average person who takes social security actually gets more or less than they pay in. Obviously everyone else gets nothing out of it since they died before they could even start taking it.
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Social security was designed to pay out more than you paid in. A sort of long-term pyradmid scheme that would have worked just fine had for birth-rates well above 3. Benifits were always paid out of the current years budget and the trust fund was simply a fiction. There was always going to be a point where there wasn't enough working people paying in to offset the benifits.
Re:Paying people to not work (Score:5, Insightful)
This "just be good" philosophy doesn't scale. If everyone had a PhD and A-plus GPA, there would not be enough positions for their talent. PhD's would end up mopping restrooms, with many unemployed.
Or are you a social Darwinist who believes the unproductive/lazy should be allowed to just wither & die so that we breed more productive humans?
Even if you hold this view, many would turn to a life of crime and/or riots out of desperation, making for a nasty society.
We are on the crest of a typical economic cycle. A recession is almost certain within a few years.
Re:Paying people to not work (Score:5, Insightful)
Or are you a social Darwinist who believes the unproductive/lazy should be allowed to just wither & die so that we breed more productive humans?
Trust fund babies disprove that approach. If you want to ensure that the next generation is productive then greatly limit inheritance and eliminate trust funds.
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I doubt there would be a single example of a person who would forsake their ambition simply because they couldn't pass it on as highly liquid value.
Those that are interested in using their wealth for a legacy would find other more concrete ways to confer an advantage to their heirs. Those heirs would be advantaged, but would have no choice but to actually work to get benefit out of it, versus a trust fund which *may* have useless entitled benefits.
Re:Paying people to not work (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to retire comfortably, you need to make the most of your productive years. Not hope for a last minute bail out.
to your advice I would add, live a solo life, never have kids, never suffer a major illness and never trust the finance industry. any one of those mistakes and all your hard won savings vanishes.
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Yes correct. Everything you said is nonsense.
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> You can form a co-op buy the now unused equipment and start manufacturing another product or under another brand.
Are you delusional? Name the last successful car company to get started as a "coop" shoestring operation by a bunch of laid off workers. Go on, I'll wait...
Hell, look at the shit Tesla gets from everyone and they've got billions behind them.
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"Social Security pays out less than you paid in until you reach around age 81. The average person lives until 78."
Huh? SS almost never pays out what you paid in. How are you figuring this?
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Social Security isn't designed like a pension system - what you put in is only loosely correlated with what you should expect to get back out.
What you're putting in right now is to support the people who are drawing Social Security checks right now plus (at least originally) some additional amount that was supposed to allow the program to better accommodate changing demographics.
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You're not disagreeing with me. I know full well how SS works, I've been paying into it since the 70s. The GP doesn't seem to...getting to 81 won't make you whole.
Arrogance (Score:5, Insightful)
The only financial safety net you need is competence.
Oh bullshit. I'm a highly competent person and I've had to rely on unemployment payments in the past to get by. My mother suffered from and eventually died from ALS. She was a high level director at one of the big accounting firm but guess what? The fact that she was highly competent didn't mean shit to ALS. Eventually she needed to rely on the social safety net including social security disability before she passed. Many people find themselves in difficult circumstances for reasons beyond their control and they need help. To say the reason for their status is that they lack competence is beyond insulting.
You have to be a special breed of idiot to think that you are so "competent" that you will never need help. Maybe you'll be lucky. Many others aren't.
We currently have move openings than people looking for work.
You think people are magically qualified for any available job? Just because my company needs a skilled machinist doesn't mean one is available. There ALWAYS are jobs that go unfilled because the skillsets of people looking for work never perfectly matches the skillsets needed by people doing the hiring.
Re:Arrogance (Score:5, Insightful)
Arguing with people like this is pointless. they are firmly in the "i've got mine, fuck you" mindset. Completely failing to see that the things they like about society (working infrastructure, security, etc) are very much related to how well off their neighbor is.
The end game is sort of like Haiti or parts of or Mexico City; gated, guarded estates -- surrounded by shanty towns. But hey, the poor are poor because they deserve it.
Re:Arrogance (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit. My wife also died from ALS. We *HAD* both LTC and LTD insurance. Certainly didn't make up ANYWHERE near what her salary was.
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plus, LTC is often time limited. For my mom, it's 5 years.
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Hmm, quickly checks some actuarial tables provided by SSA...
If you live to 69 (when you should start collecting SSA - yes, you can collect sooner, but shouldn't unless you must), then your life expectancy is another 17.2 years (if a woman), or 15.0 (if a man).
My father is 85. He's expected to live another 5.9 years. My mother is 80, now expecting another 9.6 years....
Note that those numbers w
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If you live to 69 (when you should start collecting SSA - yes, you can collect sooner, but shouldn't unless you must),
Not true! There are a lot of situations where taking SS before you can claim your full retirement make sense.
A common example is married couples. One spouse will frequently have taken time out of their career to raise children etc. The result is their SS benefit will be much lower. Quite often lower even than their spousal benefit would be. So what you do in this situation is the lower SS recipient activates SS as early as possible and collects their benefit until the higher earner reaches full retireme
Re:Drowning? Here have an anvil. (Score:5, Insightful)
The companies may blame this on trade wars, but lets be real here:
Toys-R-US was going under, regardless of what the political climate did. They needed to change with the times, because people buy cool stuff from Kickstarters, OK stuff from Amazon, and cheap stuff from Wally World. They needed to morph into a Sharper Image like store rather than compete with the wholesalers.
GM... well, the Buick Envision is a Chinese import, so are a number of their Cadillac models. Their cars have been anemic and lackluster for a while, and they have tossed technologies which could have been useful, such as hybrid pickup trucks and SUVs. They were losing money because their sedans were lackluster compared to the competition, and they didn't really innovate. So, they used the trade stuff as an excuse to shutter plants to focus on gas guzzling SUVs, which means come the next gas crunch, they will be back in Congress begging for another cash infusion, when the public is buying plug in hybrids or all electric cars from Toyota.
Both of those companies would be on the ropes no matter who is POTUS.
Re: Drowning? Here have an anvil. (Score:5, Informative)
As I understand it; Bain Capital came in and loaded ToysR Us down with debt, paid themselves, and sold off the husk.
Re: Drowning? Here have an anvil. (Score:5, Informative)
The beginning of the end of Toys R Us was the leveraged buyout (because the company was sitting on assets, had very little debt, but had hit on a couple slow quarters in sales). Bain Capital took the company, realigned the board with their players and reshuffled the executive team. They then sold off the assets, leased them back, borrowed money to the hilt and paid off the loans they took to make the leveraged buyout. And paid themselves a lot of money because they were so brilliant. What was left was a company that might have been able to change with the market and find some way to compete with Amazon, who is cleaning house in the toy bizz right now. Instead, with sales dropping every quarter as people are buying online because they don't have time to go shopping anymore, and the company already hocked to the gills and borrowing the limit of what it can, there was nothing left with which to change strategy and compete. In the end, the Bain-led board and executives took the company into bankruptcy, closed out the last of the assets and paid themselves yet again for doing such a good job destroying the company. Maybe they can make even more selling off the brand name...
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Re: Drowning? Here have an anvil. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Drowning? Here have an anvil. (Score:4, Insightful)
Both of those companies would be on the ropes no matter who is POTUS.
That's not what the POTUS says. He is happy to take credit, personally, for anything positive that happens in our economy.
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This. Even the deity Obama would not have any positive effect. Company's come and go. One day Amazon will file for bankruptcy. Its just how it is and always has been.
Japan seems to be able to have corporations that live longer. The oldest dates back to 705. In spite of world wars and stuff.
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Let's see, where is Toys and Sears work going...oh yeah, Amazon.
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Re:Drowning? Here have an anvil. (Score:5, Informative)
GM is highly dependent on sales in China, which imports 13 billion dollars of cars from the US. GM also operates plants and joint ventures in China too. So to the degree that sanctions inflict economic pain on China, US companies and their workers will suffer along with the Chinese. This can affect even workers who are working on products sold in the US. As a company's resources contract, they direct those resources away from projects that are less profitable in the short term.
Now you could argue that we'd have been better off never getting into a trade relationship with China. That would be non-orthodox from an economic point of view, but you could make the case. But even if that were true, that doesn't mean you're better off disrupting that relationship. In business what you can accomplish from where you are is what matters, not where you could have been if things had been different.
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Low sellers in the short term; with low gasoline prices people are favoring larger cars, trucks and SUVs. Light truck sales respond pretty dramatically to fluctuations in gasoline. It's like a see-saw: gasoline prices go up, SUV sales go down; gasoline prices go down, SUV sales go up.
Re:Drowning? Here have an anvil. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, GM passenger cars are terrible and buyers go a different way.
Yes, there are more SUVs being sold. "Crossovers" are just tall station wagons on bigger tires. However, Toyota and Honda still sell a metric fuckload of Camrys, Corollas and Civics to the point of them being in the top 10 vehicles sold including SUVs and light-duty trucks like the Ford F-Series, Chevy Silverado, and Dodge Ram.
Clearly Toyota and Honda know something that eludes GM - like how to build a car that isn't a pile of shit after 40,000 miles.
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Actually, a big part of the problem with the Honda transmissions isn't outsourcing the development, but rather that they insisted on designing and building their own transmissions rather than using someone else's design (or even just buying someone else's transmission). Like a lot of NIH syndrome, this resulted in a crappier product for no real good reason. Note this really is only a problem for their automatics - their manuals are fine.
Nissan's problems are mostly related to their CVT's. They've gotten
Re: Drowning? Here have an anvil. (Score:5, Interesting)
What really gets me, was around 2004-2006 Ford, Chrysler and GM cut development in their smaller car lines, and went into Trucks and SUV's. Then Gas Prices Skyrocketed and a Recession hit. So companies like Toyota and Honda were doing much better because they had small fuel efficient cars ready in their pipeline. It took years for the big 3 to get a good car lineup. However once again Americans want the big ones again. So they are not making small cars.
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What really gets me, was around 2004-2006 Ford, Chrysler and GM cut development in their smaller car lines, and went into Trucks and SUV's. Then Gas Prices Skyrocketed and a Recession hit. So companies like Toyota and Honda were doing much better because they had small fuel efficient cars ready in their pipeline. It took years for the big 3 to get a good car lineup. However once again Americans want the big ones again. So they are not making small cars.
Do you mean to say that by shifting away from small cars, they are setting themselves up for problems later? My opinion is that oil prices will remain "low" for at least the next 3 years. The oil industry is in a steady "boom" time, oil prices don't usually go up dramatically until halfway through the "bust". And fuel economy of large vehicles is much better than it used to be. My 1/2 ton truck gets 19MPG, which is bad compared to a car but is much better than the 13MPG that the same truck got in 2008.
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My opinion is that oil prices will remain "low" for at least the next 3 years. The oil industry is in a steady "boom" time, oil prices don't usually go up dramatically until halfway through the "bust". And fuel economy of large vehicles is much better than it used to be. My 1/2 ton truck gets 19MPG, which is bad compared to a car but is much better than the 13MPG that the same truck got in 2008.
Moreover electric cars are reducing demand for oil. Oil output could decline and yet still there's enough supply if demand shrinks fast enough. Also as you note fuel efficiency is up overall. Demographics world wide are aging so there's less driving due to that as well. The peak oil doomsday scenarios were increased demand and dwindling supply. At this point lower supply but also lower demand looks more likely.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Drowning? Here have an anvil. (Score:5, Insightful)
The big advantage of representative democracy isn't that it consistently elects good governments. It's that it eventually gets rid of unusually bad ones. The main problem with this is cynicism and apathy -- people getting so used to bad government that they can't even entertain the thought of one being a little bit better.
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Actually any government seems to go bad after 8-10 years. They get complacent at the minimum. As the saying goes, government is like diapers, need to be changed regularly due to being full of shit.
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But the subject of this message tree is explaining your argument.
These companies were on a downward spiral, but it wasn't necessarily an unrecoverable problem. GM, Sears, and Toys R Us have a lot of brand recognition they may had been able to last such a spiral before these Trade Wars just cut off a customer base, made their products more expensive, disrupted the full supply chain.
A company restructure is hard and in the short term they take a hit and puts them in risk, if the government decides to change t
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Half a million Federal Employees with a pension of over 100k a year is $50 billion.
Ya...Pensions are a problem for the people who have to pay for them.
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It's too much to let people retire after 25 years of work and live for 40 more after that, yep. Especially when they're contributing 10% or less of earnings.
If you want to retire at 55, you probably need to be saving 40% of more of earnings.
Re:Generous Pension Plans (Score:4, Insightful)
To put this in perspective:
Every current resident of Chicago, Illinois, is on the hook for $125,000 in unfunded pension liabilities between the city, county and state. If those pensions are actually going to get paid, every resident needs to cough up an extra $125,000 over the next 30 years. And that number goes up every year, because current commitments are still not being funded. Given the income and wealth distribution in Chicago, practically that means every complete household with decent earners will need to cough up an additional $400,000 or more towards public pensions. All while not saving for their own retirement.
Now, Chicago is by far the biggest basket case, but this is not unique.
New York City is only short about $11,000 per household for pensions. But they're also short $23,000 per household for retiree health care.
Look into your own city, county, and state, and do the math. You can practically subtract the underfunded amount from the value of your home, because that's where the leeches will be looking to extract all that money from when it comes down to it.
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Seizing all the income from the rich won't solve it, either. Surprise! It would net an additional $500 billion a year...if they all continued to work for $0 a year.
To pay for expensive goodies for all, all must be taxed. Now we're back in the 53% argument territory...third base! -- Lou Costello
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Start taxing the middle and lower class more - they're the ones with the power to vote out the politicians who keep doling out more and more benefits with no ability to pay for them and keep signing bigger and bigger spending bills for defense. When the politicians start getting voted out because everyone starts actually having to pay for what they are promising and voting for instead of rolling the debt bill astronomically higher, there will be change. The time is pretty short. Once more than 50% of the pe
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Signed, the Democratic party.
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Re:News For Nerds (Score:5, Informative)
From "This Day On Slashdot":
2005, Canada moves to keep skilled workers: https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
200, Election results certified: https://slashdot.org/story/00/... [slashdot.org]
Slashdot has always had stories about issues that affect nerds, like employment and politics.
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From "This Day On Slashdot":
2005, Canada moves to keep skilled workers: https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
200, Election results certified: https://slashdot.org/story/00/... [slashdot.org]
Going back quite a ways, don't you think?
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You and me both. ENOUGH with the politics.
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Only problem is with the birthrate dropping fairly significantly in the US, stopping immigration puts us in the same position China and Japan are finding themselves in - way too many older folks and way to few workers. Here, however, we don't have the social structure in most families where the kids take care of the parents. So be careful what you wish for - you might just get it.
Re:Trump is trying to stop illegals, for one (Score:4, Insightful)
Only problem is with the birthrate dropping fairly significantly in the US, stopping immigration puts us in the same position China and Japan are finding themselves in - way too many older folks and way to few workers. Here, however, we don't have the social structure in most families where the kids take care of the parents. So be careful what you wish for - you might just get it.
The US leads the world in legal immigration(More than #2-5 combined), plenty to make up for the less than replacement birth rate.
Illegal immigrants are, by definition criminals, and can easily be coerced into worse crimes, assuming they are not already stealing identities and other crimes which may be necessary to support their illegal presence in this country.
I'm all for legal immigration(Wife is Canadian, and we went through the entire process), but illegal immigration is bad for both the person and the country(great for lots of criminal organizations though).
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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State pension plans are better, but in the US there's probably going to be a large wave of benefits-reduction as deficits get too large to sustain, and a smaller wave of straight-up state defaults.
Most states are required by their constitutions to run balanced budgets, meaning they can't run deficits. That does not eliminate the possibility of defaults, of course.
When it comes to employee retirement, the solution my state (Washington) came up with about 20 years ago was to split the classified staff pension - half goes to a traditional government pension where you'll eventually get some fraction of your max salary for each year worked, and the other half is put into into a stock-driven fund which doe
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It wouldn't be such a problem with proper federal regulation. Companies are supposed to keep pension funds funded at a level high enough so that they won't run into these issues. You can blame Congress and the courts for failing and letting companies off the hook.