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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.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
Those are the wolf in sheep's clothing establishment Democrats.
Take a look at what Bernie Sanders and the new Democratic Socialist wing of the Dem party are saying and doing. They are the progressives.
Those wolves (including Obama and Clinton) are the corporate butlers.
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.
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.
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.
What? And have Pence take over? Sheesh.
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.
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
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.
Yup. And the facts prove it. The Social Security "trust fund" contains nothing but IOUs because politicians spent it all on other things. When I retire I fully expect SS to be gone or drastically reduced. I've planned accordingly by maxing out my 401K and investing it in safer instruments.
Back in the day there were frequently stories about "brick and mortar" stores having trouble or closing.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So what if some kid in the US rearns mote than most in the world. I could move and earn twice as mych. Cost of living would double or tripple. So I would be worse off with more money.
I also know people who took a pay cut and have a better life, because where they now live it is dirt cheap.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Private pensions can't die fast enough. They should be flat-out illegal. No private company has the discipline to put the needs of long-term employees first for the decades necessary to operate a pension plan. The temptation to raid the funds is too great. After the funds are depleted, the companies declare a short, clean bankruptcy and get a judge to reduce their pension obligations by some huge fraction. The companies emerge from the bankruptcy even stronger, without those pesky obligations to pay their pensioners. I know several people on private pension plans that had their benefits deeply cut by corporate legal maneuvers.
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.
Social security is probably the only pension system that I would trust at this point.
As I understand it; Bain Capital came in and loaded ToysR Us down with debt, paid themselves, and sold off the husk.
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.
The vehicles being phased out were LOW SELLERS. People are buying SUV's and Cross Overs. But hey, I guess YOU missed that in the article. I live in freaken Ohio, and close to the plant that is being closed. But, UNLIKE YOU. I can actually comprehend what is in the article. That plant makes the Cruse. THE CRUSE SUCKS. Christ, even a fucking KIA is better than the Cruse.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
What is your plan for these laid off GM workers? Where can they go when the largest employer in their city shuts down? Even if their skills are transferable, the plant next door does not have a use for thousands of extra employees. What if they need to move to find work? Is their home worth as much as they paid for it before a major employer skips town? Hell no it isn't, hopefully they're not underwater on the mortgage. There is no reasonable amount foresight, planning or training that can prepare someone working in manufacturing for their plant to close. They are absolutely, completely fucked.
Yep.
Honestly, it's not so much that stories like this get posted, it's that nerd shit I only sort of care about but that made this site News for Nerds DOESN'T get posted.
I'm sure there's some crazy project out there someone is doing with Linux that's mostly useless but kinda cool that we're not hearing about. There's some weird anime that I'm never going to watch but that's right up CmdrTaco's alley that we could be hearing about. Someone doing something cool but useless like 3D printing a new case to "fix" a Neo Geo Mini. Stuff that's pointless and silly but is nerdy stuff worth discussing.
E3 comes and goes, and Slashdot posts nothing. SDCC comes and goes - nothing. Granted these are giant commercial events pandering to nerds, but Apple does a keynote and we get a day of junk over every single announcement so clearly that's not the bar.
You want to know why Slashdot is dead? It's because we get political bullshit stories like these that are clearly biased, but never get pointless stories about actual nerdy crap. I suppose there's probably some random reddit out there that's like the old Slashdot, full of random open source passion projects and nerdy asides about anime and comic books and science fiction. But it's clearly not today's Slashdot. (And hasn't been well over a decade at this point, so yeah. I know. I must be new here. I still miss the old News for Nerds Slashdot.)
Let's see, where is Toys and Sears work going...oh yeah, Amazon.
Just another day in Paradise
Yes correct. Everything you said is nonsense.
I wonder what Trump had to promise GM for them to delay the announcement until after the election?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
"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?
Just another day in Paradise
This has nothing to do with trade wars. It's all about unlocking value for shareholders and enriching Wall Street at Main Street's expense. Don't be a commie!
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 people are getting a free ride tax wise, there is no hope of change - not that there's much now.
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.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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 from grandma and selling the phone for cash is not going to be viewed favorably. Or perhaps that young person can afford that phone because their family is made of money? How would you know?
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.
Raise taxes on companies to pay for all the deadbeats.
Signed, the Democratic party.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
From "This Day On Slashdot":
2005, Canada moves to keep skilled workers: https://it.slashdot.org/story/...
200, Election results certified: https://slashdot.org/story/00/...
Slashdot has always had stories about issues that affect nerds, like employment and politics.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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 and me both. ENOUGH with the politics.
"University of Massachusetts at Amherst" JSYK the other 2 campuses are effectively community colleges without housing, when you say University of Massachusetts no one's even remotely confused as to what you're talking about.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
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.
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.
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 with the worst problems always made around $125,000/year, over twice the average in the US. Why? They had enough money to buy anything they wanted. And they did.
Anyone making that much should retire a millionaire.
Do you have ESP?
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.
#DeleteChrome
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Agreed.
You wanna help retirees? Waive the damned property taxes.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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 ...
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 things around while they are in this process it will often be enough to push them over the edge.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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 were good as of 2015. They're probably higher now.
That average lifespan of 78 is AT BIRTH. Yeah, it's actually a pretty good estimate well past 40, but it I expect that the average /.'er has a life expectancy well past 78 and change....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
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.
Sorry, I don't own any Vietnamese cattle. Maybe you're thinking fo someone else?
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, many of you should be putting in more than that.
Just another day in Paradise
From "This Day On Slashdot":
2005, Canada moves to keep skilled workers: https://it.slashdot.org/story/...
200, Election results certified: https://slashdot.org/story/00/...
Going back quite a ways, don't you think?
Beware of the Leopard.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Which has nothing to do with the point of the article about retirement. Nicely done ass-hole.
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.
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/ no "slight-of-hand" involved.
Just another day in Paradise
These systems were destroyed before Boomers started retiring. They cheered on that destruction because they were making enough money that they didn't need any of it. Now they can't retire because there's nothing under them as a direct result of their own actions. They'll doubtlessly find a way to blame their kids for it.
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.
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 retirement age. At which point the higher earner actives their SS, and their spouse switches from their SS claim to claiming the spousal benefit.
TL:DR SS is a complicated mess like our tax code and if you take the time understand it just as with tax avoidance there are a lot legal opportunities to improve how it nets out for you. Just as with taxes people who can affort to pay professionals to maximally game the system for them benefit disproportionately as compared with those taking a more naive approach.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.
Just another day in Paradise
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's worth taking some time out to do some thinking. At one time America was the best. Our people ruled the world, we made all our own products. They might have been more expensive than imported goods, but the trade-off that our own people were employed and could afford to purchase said goods was held to be more important. What happened that we decided that cost of goods suddenly took not just first place, but only place? Why did we destroy our own people for the promise of cheap goods from hostile countries? Why was this the only possible way forward? Who told us this? What else are the same people wrong about today?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Now talk to someone from Greece or Venezuela. Ask them how that government pension is going.
What's the ROI for your lifetime Social Security contributions? (I'd wager dollars to donuts that it's a negative percentage.)
I'll manage my own resources, thank you very much.
Pro tip: take Warren Buffet's advice, be lazy, and invest in Index funds. The S&P500 has a 20 year average of over 9%. There is no 30 year period, including these spanning the great depression, where the index didn't make a profit.
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.
>1) Wealth is neither created nor destroyed - it only changes hands
Pray tell, where was the wealth of Silicon Valley during the Dark Ages?
Also pray tell, how do you account for a gold miner who finds a large gold nugget in a river. His personal wealth has undeniably & vastly increased. Who did he rob to get that new wealth?
You keep your mindset on fighting over your tiny slice of a tiny pie. I'll keep making newer, bigger pies.
At one time agriculture was 90% of the labor force in the country. The market is a process of creative destruction. And if everyone were that smart and capable, it would drive the price of labor way up as they could find and market new sorts of labor. The market is neither centrally planned nor static.
If we want the movie Idiocracy to be remain a satire rather than a documentary, you either need a way to let smart people have more kids survive than the below average, or an intervention to boost intelligence.
And most people aren't going to turn to crime or straight out riot, as you can eat the rich today but what are you going to do tommorow? There are options between a job in the formal economy and stright up crime. Most will look to make up the difference in mutual aid, self-sufficiency, and the informal economy.
The only ones who seem remotely secure are the wealthy, top execs and government employees. For the rest of us, we get to pay for those who have already set themselves up.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Sorry, I don't own any Vietnamese cattle. Maybe you're thinking fo someone else?
"Sorry, I don't own any Vietnamese cattle."
You probably eat them alive down to the hooves, as you heel their blood down the drain. Your neighbors ignore the terrible animal screams, unable to tell which is cow and which is creimer. That terrible gnawing hunger that never lets up, even making you smack your lips during your videos, unable to stop thinking about food.
" Maybe you're thinking fo someone else"
No, I'm thinking of a 500 pound ogre-fingered toothless oaf. Ring any bells, Chris? Maybe they'll do a Dorbz of you... Get some of that copyright money you dream about constantly...
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...
...says the slashdot poster living in his parent's basement.
Seriously though, it is well established in Slashdot that companies have no obligation to bring their jobs to where people live, and if you don't make enough money you should move to where the jobs are. Are your parents supposed to move with you? Your parents parents?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
In business what you can accomplish from where you are is what matters, not where you could have been if things had been different.
And in life!
You can look at historical house prices before you decide to rent or buy. Banks can look at employer risk when determine down payments. Millions of people move every year to find a better job. You can form a co-op buy the now unused equipment and start manufacturing another product or under another brand. Even a small amount of foresight and planning can but you in a better position for such an occurrence.
Not necessarily. If you die and you leave behind a wife and kids, they can collect your SS.
Days of yore, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and software came on punched stone tablets.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
Do you have other fun facts about housing costs or the cost of living in general?
My understanding is that in the USA land is much cheaper than over here in the UK, but the overall situation is similar: if you want to be employable, you have to live in the right places. The alternatives all can have very serious drawbacks:
- relocating across regions can be very expensive
- moving to where the jobs are involves seriously expensive rent
- living where the jobs are can mean forever be someone's housemate, instead of enjoying a more conventional family life.
Where I'm getting at is that the first mover advantage and real estate costs trump everything, and the high nominal salaries mean very little. IMHO, this is especially true when comparing to back in the day when cities were being built; or comparing to non-western world places where the quality of life is way inferior to what we know was available to our family 40 or 50 years ago.
It's annoying we don't all have flying cars, but the real disappointment is to look at the 21st century and having to settle for "at least we get smartphones instead of polio".
8 years ago was the beginning of this latest bull market. 8 years * 15,000 contributions per year does not make $400K otherwise.
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.
Anyone who mentions "late stage capitalism" is a joke of a poster who cannot be taken seriously.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
When Democrats abandoned the working class (ie most people) for ever more niche groups, like transgenders, that gave them a loss
I'm curious to know how you figure they did this. Their economic policies didn't change; the democrats are still the party that aims to reduce taxes on the 99% while the republicans still aim to reduce taxes for the top 1%. Their education policies didn't change; they still favor funding public education while the republicans still favor various "market based solutions" and other such tactics that are shown to reduce accessibility to education. What exactly do you think they did that favored "niche groups" over the working class?
Turns out that hating white males
Where did you see them doing this? What policies or proposals did you see that could be said to be aiming for that to happen?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Everyone should work for it. As an example, see Greece.
We are on the crest of a typical economic cycle. A recession is almost certain within a few years.
Not years. Months, and it's not a crest, we're on the downward side. The market is already showing the downturn, we're in a "dead cat bounce" at the moment. Usually this time of year there is a bounce or level off between T-day and Christmas as a lot of people stop paying attention to the market including the traders due to the holidays, but come January expect a blood bath. The automakers are usually the first to layoff because auto sales are the first to stall and they stalled 6 months ago, Boeing and the other biggies will follow and then on down the line ending with the small businesses. The economy is slow to respond, it's like a great big ship, even though the captain yanked the wheel to starboard it will be a long time before the ship is actually turning.
Conversely a new president will have no effect on the economy for at least a year, typically two unless they do something drastic. Trump made his drastic moves in Oct-Dec of last year, we'll feel the ship turning in less than 6 months, I'm betting it's already turning but won't be apparent to the public until June. The market is indicating this is the course, all the consumer product companies saw a 10% bump about a month ago as the institutional investors moved their money into recession safe stocks, gold is even up.
The bear market should be apparent in the next month or two as the layoffs set in. The official recession tag will be applied around June.
Social Security is fine, with maybe a few tweaks. Medicare is what you should be worried about. It'll be out of IOUs in 6 years and nothing can fix it.
But for all we know, you live in a box and put all your money into retirement. Everyone has their own idea of the sacrifices they want to make now versus later. The problem with saving for retirement is you never know if you are even going to live that long. Live meager now and die before you can enjoy it and you've lost.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Tell that to Canada... we lost billions here because of GM, they never paid back all the loan.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Wages haven't kept up with inflation in decades. Most employers don't have a retirement fund. HTH, HAND!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My wife has had cancer twice.. Don't talk like "delayed gratification" is a weakness of character. If you are responsible and working hard, you should be able to enjoy your current personal life to a certain extent. The illness has opened my eyes to living for the day and enjoying it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Er, don't talk like a failure to "delay gratification" is a weakness of character.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Your colleague from Germany should be aware that his government has no idea how to fund pensions past 2025. Their pay-as-you-go system could result in effective tax rates of over 80% for anyone still working by 2030. Good luck collecting that.
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.
Sears - First we though Walmart was going to ruin brick and mortor. Now we know it is an online book seller that has literally transformed the online buying experience for all house hold goods. You might of heard of them. Sears just failed to adapt and the executives cashed out.
They only existed for so long because they owned real estate and trucks. Then they sold the real estate.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
Their official company line is that they are going to take the savings of shuttered plants and invest in electric and other advanced vehicles. Other people have said that they are preparing for the next recession.
I'm sure they will enjoy the profits of SUVs and trucks but small cars are neither profitable or in demand. The few small cars I see on the road are usually older and in disrepair. It's not unreasonable to think that the low-budget market will become more and more used larger vehicles rather than new small cars. Making cars that are barely profitable and not in great demand is not a winning business strategy. GM's decision appears to be a smart one. Time will tell.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Two-thirds of millennials have nothing saved for retirement.....
They're also not going to retire for another 40 or so years. They don't have forever to start saving but it's also not a crisis yet.
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."
Well, people can still save if they want. Or at least try to accumulate assets (a house, investments, something like that). It doesn't have to be cash in a bank account. But if people choose not to do this, well, I can't control that.
Pension plans definitely were a passing trend. I think they only really got started in the first half of the 20th century and became widespread starting in the 40s. So for around 20 to 40 years, companies offered private pension plans then stopped. I classify that as an anomaly, not an established tradition. And we've since replaced them with 401k programs, which have substantial benefits for both employers and employees.
Bottom line, I think we still have three legs. Social Security still exists and still has the actuarial issues it's had for decades. Savings exists or doesn't as much as it's ever existed. Government-encouraged long term retirement savings, either pensions or 401ks are still out there. I don't see much structural change.
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.
That's absolutely not true. Stick your 401k into some index funds and be done with it. Why your co-workers constantly talk about the stock market IS perplexing, but not for the reasons you think.
Social security was intended as a safety net of sorts but in the end it stripped private pension funding completely. The same happened with mental health facilities, once the federal government funded them, private and state funding disappeared.
I'm paying three times as much in social security than I do in pension funding and I'll get three times less out than I do from my pension fund. There is something seriously wrong with the system.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I know 4 people who want to work but are unemployed, and don't show up on those silly numbers.
So, how do they not show up as unemployed?
Upper class Americans had fortunes to depend on.
Middle class Americans bought houses, saved money, established pensions.
The rest of Americans had what little the government would give them. It has always been this way.
What has changed is that instead of most people kicking the bucket within 10 years of retirement, we live 20-35 years past retirement now. No one saves that much money to outpace inflation for that many years. People only work half their lives. Their parents cover the first part, they cover the next. Finally, you retire in your mid sixties and unless you paid everything off and only needed food and utilities, you will have to find a way to sustain yourself for 30 more years.
The answer is, fine a way to work into your eighties or live like a poor person for 10-15 years. Retirement is not a reward, it was meant because you are useless after a certain age. So either admit you are a waste of skin, air and food or get a job.
The economy will have to change to three day work weeks for everyone soon. This is the only way to ensure there are enough jobs. That means we have to deflate all currencies so that all people can work half as much for the same pay. How else can you expect wrinkle monsters to share jobs with career McDonalds burger flippers?
So, you're idea is to spend everything and become a ward of the state? And not that I need it, but as her sole heir, I'll get nothing. In fact, I have to pay a lot of bills for her.
Just another day in Paradise
way too many older folks and way to few workers.
I hate this idea that we need to keep cramming more people into this world because older people want to have someone to take care of them. We have enough people already, housing prices are going through the roof, water supplies are getting scarcer by the day. Let's not create more of a population problem so that grandma and grampa will have a nice retirement.
my mom is one of these people. She is a hardcore trump fan and my parents both worked for 40+ years each and thought they had saved for a comfortably for retirement. Well my mom has gotten a serious medical condition and it is a real possibility that all they saved over the course of their lives could be wiped out and they will go bankrupt having to pay the medical bills that the greedy private health insurance is fighting paying at every turn. Helping your neighbor is very American, but I have no idea how conservatives with this "I got mine" attitude is benefiting my mom now that they did everything right and are about thrown out on the street for being medically bankrupt.
Buying a house used to be affordable to all. And buying is almost always better than renting. My TOTAL expenditures on mortgage/insurance/taxes for my condo is still 1000 less per month than the guy living next to me renting the same place. And I bought it in 2013. Yes, I might have moved. IN which case I"d have sold this place and made roughly 150 K.
in California, it's 2%, and 3% for firemen/police, which is what's killing everyone.
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/...
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.
Please elaborate.
Society has been changing too fast to try to breed better humans, because "better" changes. The "in" skills today may not be the "in" skills tomorrow. "Metabolically efficient" may help one survive a famine but is "lazy" in another era.
That's mostly moot because even a short-term period of mass chaos is not good in my book, and in most people's books.
Table-ized A.I.
Buying a house used to be affordable to all. And buying is almost always better than renting. My TOTAL expenditures on mortgage/insurance/taxes for my condo is still 1000 less per month than the guy living next to me renting the same place. And I bought it in 2013. Yes, I might have moved. IN which case I"d have sold this place and made roughly 150 K.
You're obviously correct however rather than face the wrath of locked out millennials they instead convinced them that renting while living downtown was trendy and only stodgy old folks actually had a home. It worked for a decade or so. I can't speak to other states but in CA the fees have made new construction *very* expensive. Yes the land is expensive but if you drill down the fees are often >$50k.
remove healthcare from jobs!
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.
In the case of Toys R Us specifically their problem was about pure greed and capitalism. This indepth piece argues the leverage buyout in 2005 was really the demise of the company. While Toys R Us was threatened by online giant Amazon, the fact that most of Toys R Us' profit had to go back to paying their LBO debt was the main reason they could never compete. There was no money for capital investment like updated intrastructure. There was no money for hiring talent, etc. All money went to private equity debt.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Social Security pays out less than you paid in until you reach around age 81. The average person lives until 78.
The only financial safety net you need is competence. Competent people who are laid off find work elsewhere.
Granted, you are not part of the competence group in this case.
First: You start paying into Social Security when you start working, that means around age 21. So all the risks of dying as a child are already avoided, increasing your life expectancy. So your calculation is off anyway.
Second: Whatever system to superficially calculate your retirement money is in place, it doesn't change a simple fact: All social payment, may it come out of pension funds, from tax based systems, from private savings or whatever, has to be earned in the period you get the payment. When you don't earn your own money, someone else is earning it and sharing his earnings with you. Any retirement payments are pure wealth distribution systems. Even if you live completely from your savings, just the fact that your savings are worth anything (and not for instance eaten up by inflation) is a sign, that other people are productive and generating products and services equivalent to your buying power. The U.S. luckily has never experienced a big inflation like many South American or European countries have, where all savings became worth essentially nil after the money got devalued. But the value of savings is solely depending on the amount of goods and services you can buy with the money, which have to be produced by someone else. The same with pension funds: Those have value because they are invested in company shares or bonds, and the value of company shares depends on the ability of the company to stay afloat, e.g. earning enough money to pay the shareholders, and the value of bonds on the ability of the debitor to repay the debts, which means the debitor has to earn money to pay. Interest payments on investments depend on debitors earning enough to pay interest on their debts, and tax based systems (including state bonds) on the ability of the country to raise enough taxes to pay out retirement money.
So wherever the money comes from you get as retirement money, someone else has earned it. Calculating if you will ever get enough out of Social Security compared with your payments is a funny, but totally meaningless game. The money you pay now gets paid out now to someone else. The money you get in the future will be paid by someone in the future.
One way to look at it is that we sold our manufacturing base to foreigners, in exchange for cheaper goods and better corporate profits. The hollowed out, decaying core of the "rust belt", ravaged by heroin addicts is the price paid for affordable cars and a rising stock market.
It stands to reason that if we attempt to "buy back" the old lifestyle, or buy a new lifestyle based on a greater self-sufficiency that there will be a cost. That cost will be born by those who benefited from the prior sale. Goods will be more expensive, corporate profits will be weaker. Wall Street will fall.
OTOH, people might have something to do again. We might even find a way to bring back 30 years jobs. Not for this generation though. This generation is screwed. We spent that last 40 years selling out to dictators. The buy back is going to hurt. Your grandchildren might appreciate it, if we manage to pull it off..
As far as economic orthodoxy is concerned, screw it. I've been saying for decades now that "comparative advantage doesn't scale". I started to realize econ was bunk when the "right" answer on a test was "loan money to a foreigner". I was being taught this dreck at UVa--Mr. Jefferson's University, you know that revolutionary dude who probably didn't want us depending on foreigners to fix our problems?
I'm not a great fan of Trump, but I get why he's there. His administration is the chickens coming home to roost. There is no refined, academic proponent of populist ideas, or that addresses the real needs of workers, because they are ruthlessly excluded from academia. Thus, we could not have the needs of the masses addressed properly by anybody other than a boor.
Elites, gaze upon your creation and marvel: you put Trump in office.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I've been kinda-sorta fatalistic ever since my teen ages but I have to say that in recent years, with a global irreversible ecological disaster closing in fast and all the other shit going down recently around the globe I suspect that we needn't prepare for a post scarcity economy rather than an all-out cyberpunk / post-growth / post-industrial age society.
Either way, wether we're headed towards some post-work utopia or a cyberpunk dystopia, for myself I've decided to carefully balance career moves and a sort of minimalist modern euro-style "prepping". I don't want to be the one standing with his pants down should society as we know it tank and everything we rely on including working computers and the internet become a quasi-luxury and cease to be the norm.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
> 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.
The same scenario happened to Sears. In addition to the huge debt from their LBO, Sear experienced increased costs as their store rent rose tremendously after the LBO. Why? Because the new CEO and major private equity holder sold practically all of Sears land holdings (which included store properties) to a shell company he owned then raised the rent on the same properties. He was making a great deal of money gutting the company.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
sarcasm
They obviously need to quit selling cars and go to a subscription model where nothing new gets developed, no bugs get fixed and the money comes in by the truckload every month. /sarcasm
fix healthcare, and I'm totally onboard.
buying is almost always better than renting. My TOTAL expenditures on mortgage/insurance/taxes for my condo is still 1000 less per month than the guy living next to me renting the same place. And I bought it in 2013. Yes, I might have moved. IN which case I"d have sold this place and made roughly 150 K.
While buying is often better than renting, that has more to do with forced savings than it actually being a good investment. Your own figures leave out a huge number of factors, such as how much your down payment was and the cost of repairs. A $150k down payment invested in the stock market instead should be expected to make $1000 per month in returns over the long run, and over a few decades you are probably spending a few hundred dollars per month more on repairs, updates, etc. that the renter isn't. And considering real estate on average only increases at the speed of inflation, it isn't a great long term investment compared to the stock market.
Your case could be different, as the "averages" don't hold up for everyone. But it still doesn't make your situation common.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Anyone who fails to recognize that Capitalism isn't achieving what it claims it does, and that it has reached a point where only a small number of people benefit from it is a fool.
Everything from "a rising tide lifts all boats" to "trickle down economics" is complete bullshit. It's really just getting the wealthy richer, and it's getting worse at an accelerating rate.
What is really happening is economic serfdom as the corporations and the wealthy game the system for their own benefit, and at the expense of everyone else. See, those 'rules' of how the market works are all lies when companies can change the playing field.
In its current form, Capitalism is simply not sustainable, and its collapse is pretty much inevitable.
And it certainly behaving how people claim it does.
When everyone else realizes just how much of a fucking ponzi scheme Capitalism is, it won't be pretty.
and the former head of Bain was Mitt "47%" Romney, 2012 Presidential candidate
If you want to reduce my incentive to work hard, produce a lot, earn a lot, pay a lot of taxes, and still have something to leave to my heirs, then eliminate trust funds.
The law of unintended consequences...
You can pretend they didn't go to the middle class, but fake news is fake. We saw these tax cuts in our paychecks and you lost credibility saying we didn't.
Bull. Shit. My paycheck didn't change by a dime. Neither did my wife's paycheck. We are very much middle class.
Given a chance to change their vote, not a single one said they would.
Because the tax cuts were a bad deal. It passes debt on to future generations of workers and does not benefit current workers.
They don't care about workers, end of story.
How many times did you have to tell that to yourself before you believed it?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Very insightful indeed. You wonder why all Western countries except the USA have social security. Such dumbasses! Can't they see the USA is the best country in the world?
-- Cheers!
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.
Is that city or highway mileage, and 2WD or 4WD? If it's city, those are awesome numbers, but highway, not as much - my old carbureted '86 2WD C10 got about 18 highway (per experience) and 14 city (per EPA). My current 2002 half-ton extended-cab Sierra (4.8L V8) with 165,000 miles gets a little better than 20 highway now, and it got about 14 mpg on average when towing a 4,000 pound trailer from Wisconsin to Florida last year, but the mountains in TN/GA had a bit to do with the poor mileage, and being a 2WD truck helps too. Not bad for an old, beat-up truck.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Didn't say we needed more kids. My point is that immigration isn't nearly as bad a thing as some make it out to be.
I don't disagree with your point that people should take the proper steps and do it legally. I do think we put too many roadblocks in the way though.
USA and Canada are as different from each other as are the USA and the UK.
#DeleteFacebook
I could be getting 40 mpg in a Civic or north of 50 in a Prius. Why would I want a land-barge that gets under 20 mpg if I can do a lot better?
Oil companies aren't charities, and I don't want to send 2x the money to them that I'd otherwise send.
> Social security, when it was established, was meant to be one leg of a stool,
What's the stool look like to those millions of people who are working "full time" jobs of 32 hours on minimum wage and rotating schedules so they can't even go get a second job? Those same people on food stamps to eat?
And back when Social Security was first established, a person with a full time job was paid a living wage. Not any more.
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.
Two-thirds of millennials have nothing saved for retirement.
Did you even read what you posted and everyone marked up? 3 Legs of a stool, one of those legs was a private pension. Hows your private pension going because mine went away twenty years ago.
I don't know many stools that work with only 2 legs. I'd also like to point out that you single out millennials, but the generation retiring right now, the boomers, have even worse numbers, 95% of boomers have less than $50k saved. More than half have nothing,
In almost every regard the boomers are worse off than the millennials, and I'll tell you one thing, they cut SS and Medicare and it's going to be the boomers that take the brunt because the millenials will have the votes to make sure they do. Millennials outnumber both Boomers and GenX combined and they VOTE!
My TOTAL expenditures on mortgage/insurance/taxes for my condo is still 1000 less per month than the guy living next to me renting the same place.
Yet, that guy is supposed to save $140k (in CA, $700k for a starter home, required 20% down) paying out whatever you do plus $1,000 a month. You have to be in a position to save that money in the first place, or get a payout in some other way (inheritance, options, loan from parents, etc).
You must be in California. We get to pay extra special taxes and costs that the rest of the USA doesn't pay...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I had a truck for years, that got terrible mileage, but it was a great truck. My daily driver, however, was an assortment of motorcycles over 15 years,most getting 50+ MPG, an absolute blast to ride, and could park just about anywhere. Plus never got stuck in traffic in California thanks to the CHP's sensible attitude towards lane splitting (like the rest of the World - outside of Canada).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
But SUV and truck sales don't go down enough enough during the downward trends to wipe out the gains made during the high-gas-price eras.
LMC Automotive, an automotive industry tracker, estimates by 2022 that GM's fleet will be 84% SUVs and trucks, Ford will be at 90%, Chrysler at 97%. What's changed? SUV technology, they're more fuel-efficient than they used to be, more advanced than they used to be. A new SUV has about the same amount of mpg (or pretty close) as an old, old sedan that someone might be willing to look to trade in. And SUV and truck sales are an arms race. My mom doesn't ever need to haul a lot of stuff, but she got an SUV rather than a car because she just feels "safer" in it. She felt that driving around in a small car was actually dangerous with all these trucks, light trucks, and other large vehicles on the road. So she got one from a safety standpoint to keep up.
Since 2013, SUV sales are up 87%, with car sales down 8%. Back then, there were only four SUVs in the top 20 sales models, now there are seven, and it's a trend that's just picking up the pace.
I ride too, but that's not feasible as a daily driver in all climates.
No, not at all. I think everyone should try to take care of themselves. I'm just not sure you're making a good argument for that to have happened in this case.
Not just new construction, but remodeling fees. I'm redoing my kitchen right now, and moving an interior shear wall as well. Fees, permits, inspections, etc. are coming to about 12% of the entire cost. That's in addition to engineering costs for the rework itself. And with materials making up about 60% of the budget, and sales tax in CA, I'll pay close to 20% to the State for the privilege of remodeling my kitchen and opening it up to the dining room...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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?
You know what? Shit happens. I'm glad you've managed to be lucky so far. Not everyone has. And hopefully, it won't take your own bad luck for you to realize this.
A high school student working less that 20 hours a week at minimum wage makes more than 90% of the rest of humanity.
People do not retire from a first-world country to an impoverished third-world country. So this comment is particularly stupid.
History has clearly shown they will badly mishandle any money that are given.
Let's compare track records: Social Security Trust fund - still exists. Still profitable. Sure, there's conspiracy theorists claiming it's all gone or stupidly thinking the general fund's debt is relevant to the trust fund. And yes, it's going to be exhausted after the Boomers, but that was the plan all along. It was only created to shore up the Boomer's retirement because GenX was too small. GenX will probably be fine, as long as the generation after the Millennials don't do another baby-bust. So far, so good on that front.
401k's, banks, etc: So, remember 2008? When we had to save all of private savings from oblivion via bailing out the banking industry? Oh, you were planning to invest in Real Estate? So, remember 2007?....
History does not back up your claims about the proficiency of private investment versus public investment.
Yep, understood. So I moved to where it was. A man has to have his priorities straight! :)
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
you are probably spending a few hundred dollars per month more on repairs, updates, etc. that the renter isn't
A renter is paying for every cost incurred by the owner of the house, through their monthly rent.
Essentially any argument that can be made for rent being 'cheaper' is going to fall into the trap that your landlord is not doing things out of the kindness of their heart and taking a loss, they are passing on costs to you.
If you stay still, it becomes worse over time, as rent goes up with market pressures. My insurance and tax may fluctuate, but when I had a mortgage payment, it would only change in ways I wanted it to. Also, I paid it off so there's actually a light at the end of the tunnel with mortgage.
In general there is a huge movement to say 'renting is better for everything!' which benefits people who actually own stuff and not so much the people stuck with no equity and held hostage by property value changes moving rent on a whim.
Renting can make sense for certain things where your use is so infrequent or there is some way economies of scale work to make it make sense, rarely is it the case that one's home is in that realm.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
But that gold nugget is only worth money if someone will pay him for it. If nobody wanted it, he would be just as poor as he was before he found it. So who's money did he get when he sold his nugget? I don't know, it is your story, you tell me who's money it is.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
I strongly disagree and will be creating a political party to further my beliefs in undending political screaming.
because older people want to have someone to take care of them
Grandma and grandpa are also going to reach a point where they can no longer care for themselves, even with a massive retirement savings. Or no savings, for that matter.
It's not a matter of want. It's a matter of physically being unable to do it. Unless you want to start embedding crystals in everyone's palm, we're going to need younger generations to care for the older.
Demographics world wide are aging so there's less driving due to that as well.
China in India are just now growing a middle-class. Driving will increase world-wide. FACT!.
Life is not for the lazy.
Move even closer to the plant and you might see that the vehicle is the "Cruze", not "Cruse".
Does anyone actually "work hard, produce a lot, earn a lot, [and] pay a lot of taxes" so they can "have something to leave to [their] heirs"?
I don't think so.
I have an heir, and I'd like to leave him something when I'm gone. If that weren't an option though, I still wouldn't try to earn less money.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Haha, I moved to where I don't have to own a damn car at all, and if I buy one, it can be something impractical and fun like a Miata or motorbike.
Explains why Chicago will ass-tax you when you sell your home. They will get their pound of flesh on the way out. Guaranteed.
Life is not for the lazy.
"Actual" unemployment includes 5 year olds and 85 year olds. And the disabled. And wards of the state. And criminals behind bars. It's closer to 40-50% last I looked. But of course we don't expect those people to work. We really shouldn't.
When talking about sociology, boiling it down to a single number is usually bollocks. Graphs with multiple variables and comparisons to other nations is almost a must. But that doesn't fit our sound-bite and protest-sign culture.
But if the USA doesn't have social security....what have they been taking out of my paychecks? hmmm....
Most of academia is left-wing, there goes your argument.
Says someone not yet on the receiving end of age discrimination. Age discrimination doesn't discriminate between competent and incompetent.
It's good that things are being talked about... Light a fire under everyone's asses because it needs to happen. Believe me, I remember niftier times... But right now, the world is on fire, and all the bullshit needs to burn.
The world is the same as it's always been. We just view it differently, and we're always talking about it, and there is no escaping the fighting over it.
Paying $40k of her own money to be taken care of by low-skilled and -paid staff would be better? Your mom couldn't have played it much smarter, people with money usually make arrangements to hide it so they can get Medicaid nursing care, but that benefits their heirs more than them
Illegal immigrants are, by definition criminals, and can easily be coerced into worse crimes
[Citation Required]
Mostly because the rate at which all immigrants commit crime, legal immigrant or not, is lower than the native population. If they could be so easily coerced, that couldn't be true.
assuming they are not already stealing identities and other crimes which may be necessary to support their illegal presence in this country.
It's generally not required. Employers will happily pay in cash. Saves on payroll taxes. 'Cause we don't dare prosecute employers for tax evasion.
but illegal immigration is bad for both the person and the country
[Citation Required]
The US has been using undocumented farm labor for about a century. Including the times most MAGA folks consider our "golden age". The Bracero program was an attempt to reform this, but it didn't play very well politically.
We're pretending this is a new and troubling problem because one party sees political gain in fear-mongering on the subject, and another party sees political gain in supporting undocumented workers.
The fact is we need a large pool of migrant workers for unskilled farm labor. Because we need a large workforce for a relatively short window of time in a particular area, which gradually moves North with the various harvests. So you can't be one of these workers and just live in your particular location, you have to migrate....or starve. And it works pretty well when the workers can go back to their home country for the winter, since it's a cheaper place to live.
Farmers will not pay enough for native USA'ians to be those migrant workers. Poor people currently from Central America will do the work for the wages the farmers will pay, so that's what happens. Other times it was workers from other countries. And we refuse to prosecute these farmers for employing undocumented workers, largely because it would mean prosecuting virtually all of them.
So, we play games about "cracking down" on immigrants to show just how tough we are, while ignoring all the people currently working the fields or the guy paying those workers.
And then you go vote, based on this game, feeling good about how tough we're being. Those children definitely needed to be in cages, and ooh! Apples are on sale!
Anyone who decries "late stage capitalism" is a joke of a poster who cannot be taken seriously.
FTFY. History is available for review and denial is not compelling.
Right, but illegal immigrants (specifically Latino) are the perfect "gimme free shit" voter.
Mark my words - the Democrat Party will be the new CCP of America. And there's a whole lot of ignorant indigent moochers all willing to give them power via future votes.
Me? I'm waiting for the entire shit-show to end not with a bang, but a pathetic whimper. "viva socialism!!!". Yeah, fuck that.
Life is not for the lazy.
I think our actual unemployment is over 10% myself.
Well I think it's 0%! see what happens when we make up numbers?
And thank you.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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%.
In an attempt to clarify, unemployed people receiving some kind of unemployment benefits are counted as 'unemployed'. Unemployed people not receiving unemployment benefits don't exist, as far as the state is concerned. They've been unpersoned.
The buyout of Toys'R'Us was in 2005, Deval Patrick joined Bain Capital in 2015. Not to say he's an angel, but it is disingenuous to say he was part of this.
Yep both sides are corporate shills and the whole left right thing is a meaningless circus albeit with an actual clown in charge now
All social payment, may it come out of pension funds, from tax based systems, from private savings or whatever, has to be earned in the period you get the payment. When you don't earn your own money, someone else is earning it and sharing his earnings with you. Any retirement payments are pure wealth distribution systems.
A better word for what you're describing would be "produced" rather than "earned"—though that isn't quite accurate either since it is entirely possible to produce a durable consumer good now and set it aside for a few decades to be consumed later. Not everything has to be consumed the moment it's produced. Even if we disregard durable goods, however, the mere fact that a good won't be produced until far into the future does not imply that it hasn't already been earned, by producing goods while deferring consumption—a process known colloquially as "saving".
What you're referring to as a "wealth distribution system" is more commonly known as simply "the economy". However, in conflating private saving and investment with tax-funded retirement schemes you're ignoring the basic economic principles of debt and contractual obligation. That's the difference between normal economic function and political wealth redistribution . When you buy or sell a share in a voluntary investment (a retirement fund, for example) there is no change in the distribution of wealth, because wealth includes both what one owes and what one is owed. You're only exchanging one type of asset (a claim on an investment) for another similarly-valued asset (cash or other goods). The same is not true when you receive a payout from a tax-funded program; the government does not consider itself indebted toward you, no matter how much it's taxed you in the past, and considers itself free to revise the terms of the arrangement at any time. Far from an equitable and voluntary exchange of goods and obligations, this is a forced transfer of wealth from one group (net tax-payers) to another (net tax-receivers). Tax-funded programs are inherently zero- or negative-sum; every cent they pay out must first be taken from someone else. Investments are positive-sum: everyone who participates shares a reasonable expectation of deriving some benefit from the arrangement.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
It is up to you to prepare yourself for all things in life, from starting a family to retirement to your own burial.
Considering half of children live in poverty and start the school day hungry (it wasn't up to them to choose where they were born), maybe that's the way things are. Alan Greenspan talked about the growing wealth inequality commenting something like the human intellect really doesn't know how to address this issue. https://www.c-span.org/video/?...
Overall comments on this thread by just about everyone are depressing and example why people vote for politicians that make policy against people's best interests.
mfwright@batnet.com
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?
What I think the grandparent said, Trump is the rebellion against academia, they are proponents of free trade, welfare system, women's rights, and immigration. People just want to be able to work support themselves and have job security.
While I think academia principles are good in moderation, they don't allow seem to debate, they just scream racist, sexist, protectionist.
Free trade good, but not to the point that all production is shipped of overseas, and only people making any money are the people that own the intellectual property.
Welfare system good, but not to the point that working people can barley make a better living than unemployed, it should be hard being on a benefit. Women's rights good, they should be equal, but not superior, saying you look nice, to someone can loose your job, or you don't get hired over a woman just because you are male or white.
Immigration good, but don't let every body in, they need to be in real need, or prove they will benefit society.
This is not just a left thing though, the right also go way too far.
Some of these problems may just be perceived ones, but when you ignore people, or just tell them they are wrong they don't just turn around and agree with you they just get more extreme in the opposite direction because they think you are being unreasonable.
The world is not binary or even linear, there is a whole spectrum of solutions that we can be discussing without name calling or assuming the other person is somehow evil.
But for all we know, you live in a box and put all your money into retirement. Everyone has their own idea of the sacrifices they want to make now versus later.
I want to address the point you're raising in just a sec, but the AC was making a simple statement of fact: that most Americans can't pay for all of those things. All we need is one counterexample from an American in the bottom half of income to disprove that claim, so the fact that I was easily able to afford those things on less than the median income is sufficient to disprove what the AC is asserting. That's all I was getting at.
But the point you're raising is also worth addressing.
I've been fortunate in life, in that I had a semester as an undergrad and then another period of several years as a grad student that compelled me to understand how far a dollar could be stretched. Those experiences continue to shape my financial outlook today, years later, but that doesn't mean I live a life of austerity. If anything, I think that I get to enjoy the here and now more than ever.
I'm the sole source of income in our home, yet we're easily able to afford a 3 bed/2 bath 1800 sqft. house on a third of an acre in a nice neighborhood, have two vehicles that we own outright, eat out regularly and have no shortage of food in the home, max out my HSA every year and have health/dental/vision insurance covered for everyone, set aside enough for our eventual retirement, have never accepted any form of welfare, have no debt other than the mortgage, and have always had so much left over that we've been able to be generous with our charitable giving as well (enough so that I've needed to itemize my deductions every year). By all accounts, I'm rich in all ways. These days I admittedly make a decent bit more than the median income, which has allowed us to add a number of things on top of the list I just said, but all of what I said was equally as true when I was below the median income just a handful of years ago.
As such, I utterly reject the false dichotomy that I see many Americans assume: that you must live for today or tomorrow. I've had no trouble doing both.
My wife had that assumption when we got married. I insisted she could have her cake and eat it too: that we could enjoy today fully and set aside enough for tomorrow, provided we were able to let our priorities actually take priority in our budget, rather than hemorrhaging funds on items that commanded an outsized share of our budget for the value (e.g. shelter, amusement, whatever) they brought. It took six months for her to come around, but she's gung-ho now. She was finally, for the first time, able to have a guilt-free enjoyment of today without anxiety about tomorrow hanging over her head, and she's also getting to enjoy her favorite things more often than she did before, now that we've been able to reduce the spending on items that were over-budgeted for what they were. Most of the less important stuff is still around, of course, but it now gets budgeted an amount that's commensurate with the value it brings.
All of which is to say, you don't need to be austere to afford necessities and nice things. The only reason there's any pushback about this is because we've become culturally conditioned to treat gluttonous spending as the norm, which has led to people looking at you like you're crazy when you suggest obvious steps like living within your means, sticking to a budget, or reconsidering the value of your expenses. The fact is, this isn't complicated stuff that requires big sacrifices. I was able to make it work—both as a poor grad student just barely above the poverty line and as a rich professional with a good income—so I know others can do it too.
I will undo a mod. I drive a new SUV due to frequent snow storms, length of my commute, stuff I put in the back every week, and supervisors who say that my job requires me to be at work due to public safety sorta stuff. (correct but rules don't apply to management)
Yes, I'd love a Tesla or somesuch, but I don't think a Tesla will work with my commute in the winter.
oh yeah, probably my last car at my age, just got rid of a 10 year old car, and gave another to charity, an aged luxury car.
mpg 32 mpg at first, down to 25 now. I don't care about that. I just have to keep my foot off the gas (hard to do when doing my commute) sorta.
Okay well I think you're earlier comment made a lot of assumptions. She did fairly well for herself in real estate, and was able to take extravagant vacations several times a year. So now, the taxpayers (through Medicaid) and primarily me are left holding the bag for her basic needs. I didn't suggest that she should save "all her money". I would have been content if she put anything away.
Just another day in Paradise
I'm not talking about anyone trying to cheat the system. And I guess if you thing playing it smart is screwing over your heirs then I guess you're right.
Just another day in Paradise
I just learned about the spousal switch this past month, while talking to family members who are navigating that maze. It's complicated, for sure.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
My wife has had cancer twice.. Don't talk like "delayed gratification" is a weakness of character.
An inability to delay gratification is a weakness of character. But so is a miserly attitude that prevents one's enjoyment of today. Your wife's illness clearly taught you the latter, but the former is just as important. There's a balance to be had.
We actually had a similar (though less severe) experience to yours, but it was the former lesson that my wife learned instead. She came down with a mystery illness on the last day of our honeymoon. There wasn't a day that went by that she wasn't doubled over in pain for the next six months. We were passed from specialist to specialist until an infectious diseases doctor was finally able to identify the one-in-a-million root cause and tell us how it could be treated.
But before the treatments could start, we needed to write a check (in the second week of the year) that would max out our deductible (for a HDHP, no less). I wrote the check on the spot without a second thought; my wife freaked out, asking where the money would come from, how we could afford it, what sort of things we'd need to cut from our budget, etc.. When I told her that the money was already set aside, that it was there for exactly this sort of purpose, and that it wouldn't impact anything in our budget, she finally understood the importance in thinking beyond today. Small changes made years prior were all that had been necessary to prevent an unexpected major expense from becoming a catastrophic financial situation.
Of course, learning that former lesson hasn't stopped us from practicing the latter one by traveling Italy, building a gaming computer, renovating much of our home, taking a cruise, and doing a huge number of other things for our own enjoyment since the treatment wrapped up. It just means that we've also made sure we have the money ready in case we need it again.
Kudos to you, sir!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I think you get it. It's not about "left vs. right", it's about "top-down vs. grass roots". The leadership ignored the masses until it got so bad that people were willing to latch on to anything that wasn't just more of the same.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
When Democrats abandoned the working class (ie most people) for ever more niche groups, like transgenders, that gave them a loss
I'm curious to know how you figure they did this. Their economic policies didn't change; the democrats are still the party that aims to reduce taxes on the 99% while the republicans still aim to reduce taxes for the top 1%. Their education policies didn't change; they still favor funding public education while the republicans still favor various "market based solutions" and other such tactics that are shown to reduce accessibility to education. What exactly do you think they did that favored "niche groups" over the working class?
Their economic policies most certainly did change. Supply and demand is a basic thing. By increasing how many H1B and other visas you increase supply. By favoring free trade you decrease job demand. You realize that Bill Clinton let China in the WTO and signed NAFTA into law. Thus we have less in real wages than in the 70s. I'll provide links, but despite all the talk about increasing productivity the reality is that most of the gains have gone to the top 1%. To be fair to the Democrats, this trend is consistent across both D and R administrations. Still, they have done exactly *nothing* to try and turn it around other than lip service about training for the new economy. Want to see Democrats that really pushed for the little guy (ie the 99%)? Think Teddy Roosevelt and breaking up trusts, which today would be more like huge corporations. Think FDR who despite his *many* faults was at least trying to do something. Think Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. The Democrats were at one time the party of the little guy. No more.
Turns out that hating white males
Where did you see them doing this? What policies or proposals did you see that could be said to be aiming for that to happen?
If I say that preference will be given to women and minorities then what I have really said is that everyone other than white males will be given an advantage. That could be restated as everyone is equal but white males get penalized. Can it be more clear? In case that isn't clear enough they have run job descriptions that specifically asked for no white straight males.
Citations:
https://www.epi.org/productivi... https://www.theatlantic.com/bu... https://www.spiked-online.com/... https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lu...
This is a huge problem, and one that liberals in particular should have capitalized on this election cycle.
Indeed they should have, but unfortunately, they seems to still think they lose because of Russians.
Ya, I hate finances. And I hate having a financial adviser that tells me to dump a plan and move to another plan, which several times in the past leaves me with a tax bill and no actual growth. There's a lot of dice being rolled and it's not hard to lose money while actually doing what seems like the right thing. No one should be required to be a day trader just to stay ahead.
I didn't start saving until my 30s, primarily because I went to grad school and paid for a bunch of it myself. So that automatically put me behind people who started funding 401Ks in their early twenties. Also I wish I had the simple index fund and just stuck with it, and not listened to financial advisers who want to do something more risky, or they made changes at bad times.
those aren't the things we want. It's what's being offered. The things we want (a good, meaningful life with friends and family) aren't really on the table for a lot of folks. All it takes is one family illness, picking the wrong career path or just plain being born in the rust belt and you're basically done.
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 impossibility. Someone spent a lot of time and money to make that joke into a badge of pride for the lower class being trickled down on.
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My mother was originally going to rely on my father's pension, and so she had not been paying into social security. Late in the game they realized that meant no medicare so she started contributing. So the Social Security check today is ridiculously small, something like $40 or so. But she has other investments so is doing ok.
which is a logical fallacy. TFA isn't a definitive source, and forums like this exist to point that out.
Let me know how well you and yours are doing in 40-50 years when one of them needs a heart bypass. Or a hip replacement. Maybe you'll get lucky, pick a career that isn't outsource and not be lied to by recruiters. I left a small town that was booming in the 90s with IT jobs before they all got shipped to India. Lots of folks got trapped in that town. Went from $70k/yr to $12/hr if they were lucky. Couldn't get away.
TL;DR; No man is an island.
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they die. That's what they do. They die. About 1 every 11 minutes.
The left needs more fearmongering. But can you really call it fearmongering when there's something real and legitimate to be frightened of? I don't know, but we lean to heavy on hope and change. That doesn't get the votes. Fear does.
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not doing so hot financially? You just need to "git gud".
I really think that too many video games is partly why the nerd community is so receptive to this bootstrappy nonsense. You get used to being able to practice something until you're good at it. Gives you a bit of en ego...
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This. Anyone that says "late stage capitalism" needs to do a shred of thinking on what "late stage marxism" looks like. Here's a hint: Lots of very full mass graves!!
US male life expectancy at 65 has been holding fairly steady at 17.9 years. So if that 81 figure is correct, the average male takes out more than he put in. Women get almost an extra three years.
The added weight and the all wheel drive of Tesla's make the great choices for snow.
Just remember, they are heavy for their size. Great for traction, but may have a longer stopping distance vs a more regular car.
I have 2. One Model S that's two years old and all wheel drive and a few month old Model 3 that is rear only.
No, we have things of poor quality in California that are called roads. The things that suck are members of the corporate group in Sacramento Government who prefer to dump tax dollars into high speed trains between Bakersfield and Modesto.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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 better as the technology has matured, though the other option they've used is also dumping the CVT option on some models and going back to a conventional automatic which they've usually done a decent job with.
The biggest problem is "bigger is better" attitude when it comes to the number of gears, part of which is driven by MPG requirements. After about 6 gears you really hit the point of diminishing returns for a regular car and after that you're just making the transmission more complex and fragile for only a very modest improvement to mileage and bragging rights.
Where you filled up yesteday. Costs me $6.94/gallon (more if I use proper UK gallons).
BULLSHIT every single company you mentioned LOST millions actually it was 800 million. Reality Toy 'R Us could not compete with Walmart in the brick and mortar and couldn't compete with Amazon online. It was over before the PE firms ever came around.
If "buy new home" was simply a matter of [luxury-tagged] dollars the behavior would be uniform across cultures within income tiers.
People also buy diamonds "because I wanna" and it's an entirely cultural construct. If you're worth these keystrokes you already know that it was an entirely orchestrated phenomenon, and we're as much to blame as De Beers.
We're quite sensitive to the goals penciled in around us. We even convince ourselves they were ours all along, and it had nooooothing to do with media and observing the world around us, this is what I want for meeeee, I'm giving Morty an A in math. It wasn't because of the world insisting your life is incomplete, you're not a fully actualized person if you haven't hit the bullet points we set for you on careers, relationships, property, appearance. If you look closely you'll notice the phrase "I don't own a TV" is being spoken *at* this. It's real and it drives people's wishes.
To be perfectly honest, the "unemployment" numbers are all bullshit. What you really should look at are employment numbers. Those tell a different tale. One that shows declining participation in the workforce since the 70s, IIRC, which means fewer people working over time. That number is also more meaningful in other ways, because it indicates productivity and tax base. You can slice that data in a number of ways to see who is getting jobs, who is working at what level, and then correlate it to the population numbers at large to see patterns of inclusion, wealth, etc.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Back when Slashdot was "News for Nerds" this story wouldn't be posted.
That's quite a declaration from someone with a UID in the 4.5million. When was "back when"? 2017? 2016?
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 - maybe if one is living in their parent's basement with their family in Buttfuck, Potatohoe. Have a look at the consumer debt figures,rates and trends sometime. People are financing their way of life with debt.
Where I live (Metro-Atlanta), a one room cheap apartment is $1,200/mo. Then there are car payments - one USED reliable car (5-10 years old/~$15,000) is going to be about $400/mo financed over 5 years. Then there is insurance: $100-$150/mo or more of you're a shitty driver. AND I'm assuming that the job has health and dental and vision insurance so I won't count that (Add $300+/mo for that)
Take home pay after tax: 1,692.31/mo; less above: -57.69.(-$359.69/mo with insurance)
So, food clothing and other things would have to purchased with a credit card.
Now, add kids to that.
You're out of your mind. You can get a brand spanking new Toyota under $16K. You can get an apartment for under $700 a month in Atlanta Georgia, but it won't be a premium nice place to reside. Then again, if money is a constraint, you won't be living in the Hamptons nor driving a Rolls. And I think that's where most people go wrong. At less than $700/month, you can save $6K / year for a downpayment on a condo or house as compared to that $1200/month apartment, so in 5 years, you can move out of that apartment and into your own place. No matter what your income, you need to live below it to get ahead. That may mean no tv, no phone, etc for a while until you get to where you want to be.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
SS should be considered as a monthly bonus that might pay your medicare insurance, maybe. I basically don't consider it at all, nor the tiny pension I have coming, and basically work off the basis that everything will be paid for out of my own funds. This allows me to plan appropriately and drives my current budget to a sustainable level. BTW, if you want any sort of lifestyle in retirement at all, you should definitely be aware that you're going to be paying for additional health insurance, otherwise any incident at all will drive you to 0 wealth in a hurry.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Most people need to learn basic money management strategy meaning you don't spend more than your income is unless you're in a emergency, and for that people need to save some money for the rainy days. Long time ago I decided to save money and have a f...ck you fund to cover ALL my expenses for a year in case I get laid off or something else. Unfortunately this won't cover medical emergency if you don't have health insurance since the health system is so screwed up that an couple of days of an ER visit with put you back in the 10s of thousand of $$.
I'm not sure why your post is at "0" when you hit the nail on the head for a big part of American society, the so-called "middle class." Sure, there are extremes on both ends (lower and upper class), and every decade there are new challenges to be met, but the idea that somehow the majority of the US population is to be pitied or needs a handout is ridiculous. For many, the person in the mirror is the one that they need to look to.
I have spent decades living within my means, having climbed out of the "lower class" on the coattails of the computer revolution and not wanting to slip back down by being stupid. I watched "defined benefit" (pension) plans sunset as "defined contribution" (401(k) or CODA) plans rose up and I acted accordingly. I vastly preferred trading the uncertainty of a future pension (if the company stayed in business, if I stayed working for the company long enough, and if the pension's funding/investment choices held out long term) for my own portable retirement nest egg. Social Security as a "retirement fund" was known to be inadequate when I entered the workforce in the 1980s. For the middle class, the problem with planning for retirement is that people (in the US anyway) tend to be more grasshoppers than ants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper. My wife and I have friends/relatives who are still putting their noses to the grindstone as we slip into semi-retirement despite the same (if not more) opportunity than us, the difference being that we were more ant-like, and they were more grasshopper-like.
The big company failures (GM, Sears, and Toys-R-Us) that are cited in the article as failures were struggling for years (Toys-R-Us) if not decades (GM, Sears). Adverse economic circumstances are one of the risks that a company has to be prepared to deal with, the same as individuals. GM has struggled since the 1980s, with big ups and downs as they (and other automobile manufacturers) try to figure out how to stay product-agile in an industry with multi-year development cycles [Japanese industry seems to have adapted more quickly and successfully than domestic auto production]. Sears was a big empire that apparently failed from within, totally missing the boat in on-line sales despite their heritage as a tele-sales company in addition to brick-and-mortar stores. Toys-R-Us was saddled with unbearable debt due to the leveraged buyout in 2005.
Ups and downs in the marketplace and supply chains are normal, but expose and exacerbate weaknesses in businesses. Ups and downs in the economy are natural, but expose weaknesses in personal financial planning. Expectations that the government will somehow provide a risk-free business or individual economic foundation are misguided at best. Companies and households that fail to anticipate and plan for risk and that aren't adaptable to circumstances will have hard times when risks turn into problems and circumstances change.
While your attitude towards personal responsibility is correct and admirable, your understanding of what people have any control over is... weird.
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?
So you are saying that buying an iPhone and TV can leave you without enough money to retire? Seriously? iPhones and TVs are dirt cheap. They are the cost of one whole paycheck. In order for what you say to be true, then $2,000 has to have some weird properties that are not directly related to its obvious value. I get it though, you are trying to say they are fiscally irresponsible. I would argue that it costs too much to live in Society. But we can agree to disagree on this one.
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.
Well, sure... but 90% of humanity doesn't incur the same costs to live in society that the high school student does. Want to eat? In America, that will be $5 please. In 90% of the rest of the world, if you had to pay money instead of growing it/catching it yourself, you would pay the local equivalent of 2 cents. Don't fool yourself here. Would you rather have $10 or $100? Wait a sec, let me give you some more information first... for the $10, you can buy a shelter forever, food for a month, and buy a pack of playing cards. For the $100, you can buy a nice dinner. Now, which amount of money would you want?
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
Agree. But what if your money was worth less than you thought it was? As I have demonstrated, $100 is not $100. What if you thought you had saved enough, but when the time comes, you find out interest has hollowed our your nest egg? Back in 1970, retiring with a million dollars would have been legendary. Now, retiring with a million dollars ensure that your doctor and health insurer gets paid for a few years.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
"Retirement dependent almost entirely on how well they manage savings" Shocking. Imagine that.
You will be the victim of a bigot/hypocrite like yourself in a drive by shooting. You will suffer a slow and painful death, and if karma works. Your family will die the same way at the same time.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
If you substitute your idea of a top-ranked performer, my point still stands. How about make 3 million clones of Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, Warren Buffett, and Oprah for the thought experiment.
During the top of the business cycle, yes there are more opportunities for the displaced, but one cannot say that's the typical state of things because we are not always near the top of the cycle, per definition of "cycle".
Table-ized A.I.
Then what happens to the next generation when they get old? Who takes care of them? We'll need even MORE workers at that point.
I don't disagree with your comment, but I want to add that the whole idea of a long, old age retirement is new, unnecessary, and (IMO) detrimental to the human condition.
One must wonder, why do people want to live so long? Certainly, most people have an innate desire to "not die" at any given moment, but it seems quite obvious that, at a certain point, death is really the best option - especially when one can think on it a bit and plan it out on their own terms. Of course, the Abrahamic religions have classified ending one's life on their own terms as forbidden. This has translated into societal norms that classify suicide as weak, selfish, "insane," etc. These norms have also made it impossible for a healthy person to easily source humane, on-demand life termination services. Instead, the options with which we're presented are mostly horrifying and, quite frankly unfair to those who must deal with the aftermath. As such, people are pretty much programmed to sit in pain, rotting away until they rattle their last undignified breath.
But, with the religion (thankfully) on the decline, why do we not see movements such as "live life to the fullest while you're healthy?" I mean, we see this to some extent, but it's largely marginalized. Why could that be? I'd venture that it's because two of the largest, most profitable industries in the Western World have the most to gain by drawing out your life as long as possible - your own enjoyment of that life be damned. Those are the investment industry and the health care industry. The investment industry makes truly MASSIVE amounts of money convincing you to "delay your gratification" so you can live well later on. The commissions and management fees in this industry are enormous (financial services vet here) and frequently supported by fear mongering statements like "you don't want to be eating cat food when you're 90." I could go into how this is necessary to support an economy largely built on "imaginary" stock value, but that would make this already long post much longer. Once the financial services firms have milked you of all income earning years it's time for the healthcare and elder care industries to take over. Now you're on 10 medications, are regularly seen by physicians, undergo routine testing, and, eventually, full time care. During that last phase you get all the fun things like $5 pudding cups, and $.10 per minute phone calls. The ideal for everyone in these industries is for you to die once you're completely destitute - not a moment before and certainly not after (unless they can milk your family in some way). Dying on your own terms when you realize your body isn't going to allow you to maintain the quality of life you expect - hell no! Where's the profit in that?
Funny thing is, this whole thing is so new. People only recently adopted this idea that they should work a while and then live, unemployed, for 30 years after. Heck, if they did live well past their working years it was typically with the help and support of their children or other family members.
Fuck all of that. Many of the things I enjoy (such as skiing, hiking, and motorcycle racing) come with a limited window of enjoyment. I'm not going to avoid these now so I can do them when I'm 70. Similarly, I'm not going to wait until my daughter is 30 to take her to Disney World. Sure, I save. I save so I can set my daughter up for success in life. I save so unexpected expenses don't become crises. I save so that I can eventually leave work and have some grand adventures while my body is still willing to cooperate. I don't save so big medicine can hook me up to tubes and suck out all the money I "earned" by not enjoying life while I could. Hopefully the world will someday offer me the chance to decide when physical limitations prevent me from wanting to stick around any longer. Hopefully it will offer a humane way to leave my family and friends with dignity and a bit of extra money to take their own wild rides while they can. Ask yourself: How in the world is this not already an option?
Correction, 300 million clones to mirror the population of the USA.
Table-ized A.I.
Why was it intentionally misspelled as "Cruse"? That's neither an ironic nor humorous variant. And literally every product in the US has its name trademarked, nothing unique there.
The government is only as free to do as the voters allow, unlike private pensions that can be wiped out by simple bankruptcy proceedings.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”