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'General Motors, Sears and Toys R Us: Layoffs Across America Highlight Our Shredding Financial Safety Net' (nbcnews.com)
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.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
It is interesting to watch people that are one minor accident or treatable chronic disease away from having to face reality.
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.
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.
The US plays a slight-of-hand trick with its unemployment figures, cherrypicking whom it considers homeless in order to improve its image. for example The U-3 is the rate most often reported in the media. In the U-3 rate, the Bureau of Labor Statistics only counts people without jobs who are in the labor force. To remain in the labor force, they must have looked for a job in the last four weeks.
The U-6, or real unemployment rate, includes the underemployed, the marginally attached, and discouraged workers.
Actual unemployment in the US is 7.4%.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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.
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.
You wanna help retirees? Waive the damned property taxes.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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/...
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.