http://angrybear.blogspot.com/2009/05/nw-plan-for-real-social-security-fix.html (or http://tinyurl.com/yjlbl92 ). It amounts to about a dollar a week per worker. Read their math and see what you think.

Second, the only options are a money market fund or a series of mutual funds, all of which are problematic based on things enunciated in this article. I would have been better off systematically investing in the inflation protected t-bills, since I only leave my money in the money market fund.

Third, because of many of the issues identified in this article, the 401-k system is NOT about providing a secure retirement, it IS about channeling money into the stock market to be frittered away by the fools, thieves, and crooks who we pay to manage our mutual funds.

Of course, I think we live in exceptional times. The certainty of uncertainty is in our faces every day. That said, to not use the past to predict the future is to fly blind.

Their point seems to be that smaller governments closer to the constituency they are there to serve may be more in their interests than a big distant government that may well be, in fact, defrauding them.

I don’t think we can sit here today and try to pretend that our federal government in not complicit in mass fraud that not in the interests of most of the US citizenry (but which is certainly in the interests of some).

We need to kick the “government is good” habit. Good government is good. This government is not good.

What to do about that *must* be a real question.

Globalization is a redistribution program that takes jobs from the rich countries and give to the poorer ones, complete with high overhead and waste in the form of banks/corporations/stockholders.

See, now it doesn’t sound so bad!

I was merely pointing out that the 12.4% of income contributed to Social Security (split 50-50 between employer and employee), if managed properly, would not require large additional private savings or risk taking to provide for retirement. According to the author, “we’re assuming that Social Security will be around in its current form.” I do not believe one has to be “anti-government” to point to the failures of Social Security program or to suggest that a Federal bureaucracy is not the solution to every problem. The Federalist-anti-Federalist debate is a truly American debate that does not require labels such as anti-government which sounds to me like “right wing conspirator” or “anarchist.”

The Galveston plan was originally voluntary and 70% of employees participated.

You can save a lot make good investments and still end up on the street as there are so many unknowns. At this time, when facing climate change threats, energy scarcity, the disinvestment in jobs that has paid for the low inflation the last decades and an over-indebted and overextended society, these discussions sound surrealistic to say the least.

There´s nothing as plenty of kids you love and hope they love you back as a valid retirement plan.