President Biden managed to rile up a contingent of Republicans by pointing out that they wanted to get rid of social security, and also medicare and medicaid. They were indignant. Not so, they screeched.
Sen. Mike Lee reacts with disbelief and shock that President Biden said some Republicans propose sunsetting Social Security and Medicare. Pure disbelief. Where could Biden get this obviously false crazy idea? Note that he did this while sitting next to Sen. Rick Scott, the guy who actually formally wrote the proposal as the Senate GOP platform position.
Huh. Funny how Lee used the promise of destroying social security while campaigning for the senate, and Rick Scott published a brochure explaining that he would do it. They’re on the record and are now lying about it.
After Lee was shown on TV expressing outrage over Biden saying that some Republicans wanted to cut those entitlements, critics online shared a video of an event from Lee’s Senate campaign. In the video originally posted to YouTube, Lee told a group of voters in Cache Valley, Utah, on Feb. 23, 2010, that he was about to “tell you one thing you probably have never heard from a politician.”
“It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up from the roots and get rid of it,” Lee said at the time. “People who advise me politically always tell me it’s dangerous and I tell them, ‘In that case it’s not worth my running.’ That’s why I’m doing this, to get rid of that. Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort. They need to be pulled up.”
Ron Desantis and Nikki Hailey have also endorsed cutting social security and raising the retirement age. I’m rather horrified at that, being 65 years old, and considering a delayed retirement already, at 67 or 68. Also, I registered for social security when I was 13 years old, and noticed then that a significant chunk of my $1.65/hour pay was snatched away by the gubmint. I figured it was OK, since it would contribute to my unimaginably distant retirement (now pretty easily imagined), but it means I’ve been paying in for 52 years. You don’t get to cut MY money, guys.
I hope the Democrats can get fired up and campaign hard on this issue.
Also, could everyone shut up about the stupid balloon? Yeah, China spies on us, we spy on them, everyone is spying on everyone.
Democrat candidates should exploit that episode to their fullest extent in the upcoming elections.
“Sen. Mike Lee reacts with disbelief and shock that President Biden said some Republicans propose sunsetting Social Security and Medicare.”
The reaction actually becomes logical and morally consistent for Sen. Mike Lee if his disbelief and shock are at the idea that anyone took him seriously enough to remember anything he had said, let alone repeat it back to him.
Anyone who wants to cut Social Security and Medicare is an evil idiot.
.1. These programs are self funding!!! Through payroll taxes.
They have nothing to do with the National Debt and the annual deficit.
They are simply irrelevant.
.2. Social Security and Medicare are very effective programs and very popular. Most of the US population are enrolled in them.
Before Social Security, old age was almost synonymous with living in poverty.
.3. The GOP keeps saying that Social Security will run out of money in 2033.
Given that our planning horizon is now two weeks, that might as well be forever.
And it is also false.
If nothing is done to change the economics, Social Security won’t run out of money ever.
They will have to start reducing payments in 2033 but not by much since payroll taxes will still be coming in.
The only reasons the GOP wants to get rid of Social Security and Medicare is pure evil. Cruelty is its own reward.
Plus, there is a huge stream of retirement money and they want to grab as much of it as possible for their own accounts. It is greed and theft.
“Hysterical” should be avoided in my opinion. The association with irrational feelings and the feelings of women affects the political atmosphere.
Degendering irrationality is useful.
Scorpions sting, grifters grift, evil people evil on.
.
Looking at the old white men… can you not vote Alice Cooper into the place? He is 75, but somehow seems much younger than this bunch.
Rick Scott embodies everything wrong with the corporate world he represents. There’s Columbia/HCA: “During his tenure as chief executive, the company defrauded Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs. The Department of Justice won 14 felony convictions against the company, which was fined $1.7 billion in what was at the time the largest healthcare fraud settlement in U.S. history.[7][8]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott
And his sole reason for getting into politics seems to be a visceral hatred of Obamacare. His Conservatives for Patients’ Rights with the cutsy CPR acronym sounds Newspeaky.
The GOP rarely says the want to eliminate Social Security and Medicare directly.
They usually lie about it because they know these programs are part of the basic fabric of US life.
What they usually say is:
.1. Let’s privatize Social Security.
Not a bad idea and in fact, so good it has already been done.
We have 401(K)s, Roth IRAs, IRAs, various private pension plans, various government pension plans, and most people have bank accounts and brokerage accounts.
Our retirement systems are already both public and private and the private plans are probably the larger part.
.2. And, Let’s reform Social Security and Medicare.
Meaning let’s reform Social Security and Medicare so they don’t work and then collapse.
So, we can say, we told you so.
Reform in GOP Orwellian speak = Destroy
.3. They also aren’t going to take Social Security and Medicare away from old people.
Because their base is old white people and they vote and cash their Social Security checks.
What they want to do here, is grandfather in the old people and divert the young people into their “private account” plans.
Really, the main reasons to destroy programs that work are cruelty and greed.
Those private programs are a huge opportunity to siphon off trillions of dollars of American retirement money.
Ironic that Rick Scott wants to eliminate Medicare seeing as he made his fortune by defrauding Medicare.
OT.
Why I would rather walk than buy a Tesla.
Musk lives in the country of “stand your ground” and the NRA. His Starlink operation wants to restrict Ukranian use of Starlink because they are using it to defend themselves. Now, according to Musk, defending oneself is not defensive but offensive. I find Musk offensive. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64579267
They finally figured out what Romney and Santos were saying to each other:
https://youtube.com/shorts/9yoxi3GjoCQ?feature=share
raven @ #7
It’s true that retirement plans are both private and public, but I’m not sure I agree that it’s “not a bad idea.” The biggest problem from my perspective is that 401(K)s have market volatility. I would rather my retirement not be dependent on stock market volatility. I’m also concerned that my 401(K), which is part of my compensation package, is heavily invested in my employer and I’m already over concentrated in that stock through EPPs and RSUs. I gather this is not unusual in some industries. It’s working out okay for my family so far, but we have a rather large risk if things go south at the company I work for.
When I’m in the car, I usually tune to Relevant Radio, a (very) conservative Catholic radio station, just for yuks, and even on a show where the host was recently spouting the most vile insinuations about the recent sudden death of a child in school somewhere in New England to promote his antivax crusade, a regular guest brought on to discuss the current economic situation was sounding the alarm bells over the Republican goals of weakening Social Security and Medicaid.
Not sure whether he’ll be invited back anytime soon, but he rightly pointed out that millions of Americans well into their 40s are still in debt, and have virtually no chance of ever saving enough to pay for their own retirement.
They should but they won’t. Defending SS or MediCare would mean defending “Big Gumbint” and the Dems said those days were over. As always, we can’t afford alienate any potential voters… except actual leftist voters that is.
Now that I think about “hysterical” gives bigotry too much credit to limit it to irrationality, illogic and other things get lazily lumped in there too.
Absolutely amazing. I have never seen this before. I am smacked in the gob. Gob smacked, even. Republicans admit, in print and on video, that they want to eliminate SS & MediCare. Democrat points out that they said this. Republicans freak out and claim that the Democrat is lying. The only time I have ever heard of this happening is when a conservative makes a death threat, proposes political ideas that would hurt most Americans, lies, says anything racist or misogynistic or bigoted or sexist, over the last thirty of more years.
Sorry about the garbled logic in 14. I hope my point was clear.
OT
Burt Bacharach, singer and songwriter
1928-2023
😥
Bush tried it earlier in this century.
It didn’t go any where.
It’s all there. The coded language, “privatization” and “reform”.
As I mentioned before, we already do much of this.
The 401(K)s, Roth IRAs, IRAs, and many other retirement plans.
Most people I know have a 401(K), and at least one and usually more IRAs.
Rick Scott and his team are now putting the finishing touches on a brochure detailing his plan to solve the preschool overcrowding problem. The government will simply kill every families first born child. In fairness, I should point out that not all Republicans support this approach.
raveb @18:
Sorry. Sarcasm fail on my part.
Maybe it’s my accent that makes my humour and satire fail?
I knew that.
I just thought I’d point out that Bush actually tried to kill Social Security in 2005, just like the GOP is trying to do today.
In fact, the GOP has been trying to kill Social Security since in was developed by Roosevelt in 1935, during the Great Depression.
I know Oggie: Mathom is interested in history so they probably already know this.
For everyone else, the GOP War on Social Security started when they tried to vote it down in 1935. Here it is, 2023 and they are still trying to kill Social Security.
The GOP always seems very lacking in new ideas.
Defend slavery, defend segregation, hate Social Security, hate immigrants, hate uppity women, and on and on. Trying to turn the clock back to 1860 or maybe the Dark Ages.
The Republican attacks on Social Security
raven @ #22
The GOP always seems very lacking in new ideas.
Defend slavery, defend segregation, hate Social Security, hate immigrants, hate uppity women, and on and on. Trying to turn the clock back to 1860 or maybe the Dark Ages.
The idea of the GOP defending slavery is extremely ironic given that the existence of the GOP owes a lot to their opposition to slavery in the 1860s…at least some of Republicans. Of course, this ties into one of the themes in the Southern rationalization of the Civil War: the GOP wasn’t opposed to slavery per se, but Northern industrialists wanted to break the power of Southern growers, which they succeeded in doing. By the 1870s or so, the GOP was dominated by the industrialists who were “conservative” about all kinds of social issues, including racism, except the US government spending money on industrialists. Heather Cox Richardson has written quite a lot about the rise of the anti-socialism theme in the GOP and its relationship to racism (and sexism for that matter) in the US.
As I’m sure you know, there’s nothing special about delayed retirement age:
The official government-quoted “retirement age” of 66.6666 for you (67 for me as the law changed for us young’uns) is really just a parameter in the social-security equation and does not represent any special cutoff, as this equation (approximately) linearly increases your benefits by your age from age 62 up to a maximum benefit at age 70. Nothing special about 66.6666, you get a similar increase by waiting one more year whether you are age 62 or age 69. If there is any cutoff that deserves the name “retirement age” in the USA, it is age 70 at which you max out your benefits and get no marginal benefit from further waiting, or age 62 when you can first tap out.
On the one hand, that liberates one from waiting until 66.666, since there is nothing special about it. On the other hand, that might motivate one to hang on until age 70.
I liked this article about how it is calculated, with a plot showing the exact scaling and also explains how this nomenclature allows republicans to confuse everyone into reducing their ssa benefits:
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/10/26/what-does-it-mean-to-increase-the-social-security-retirement-age/
Brony
Agreed.
“hysterical” is a gendered insult.
@ raven #22 “hate uppity women, and on and on. Trying to turn the clock back to 1860 or maybe the Dark Ages.”
Probably no farther back than 1595’s “Disputatio nova contra mulieres, qua probatur eas homines non esse.”
@ answersingenitals #19, someone probably gave them a copy of “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathon Swift.
Social Security is an insurance policy, not a savings account. Some of us won’t live long enough to collect. Who’s willing to bet against his/her/their own years of life because there’s a chance of an early demise?
I’ll never understand why Republicans want to destroy it.
But .. but,
squirrel!Balloon!Yeah., its a distraction.
Alos thirds #4 Brony, Social Justice Cenobite & #25. chigau (違う) here.
Maybe I missed it, but no one seems to have noticed that if the 2005 GOP effort to privatize Social Security had succeeded, the financial meltdown of 2007-2008 would have wiped out everyone’s retirement benefits (except for the rich, who would have pocketed most of the money beforehand).
This is OT for this post but I think it’s right on target for this blog:
Navy New Religious Test for all sailors – WTF:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/9/2152021/-Outrageous-U-S-Navy-orders-commanders-to-implement-a-religious-test-for-all-sailors
Yep, ‘hysterical’ is a gendered insult. It flies under the radar because it’s not obviously gendered unless you know your Greek roots or a bit of medical or feminist theory, and also it has evolved some common usages that are not always derogatory (e.g. ‘hysterically funny’ to describe a comedy). But it’s definitely gendered, it’s not exactly obscure knowledge that it’s gendered, and to make matters even worse, ‘hysteria’ has a long history of being really, really bad science even by ancient standards and a historical tool for oppressing women, including forcing them into normative heterosexual relationships. (Nothing wrong with heterosexual relationships of course, it’s the normative and the forcing that are the problem).
@29 weylguy – Good point about the 2007-2008 debacle. But, we don’t need any political hatchetmen trying to destroy Social Security to have everyone’s retirement benefits destroyed. The obscene profit pushing prices through the roof as a result of the greed of the Crapitallist Corporations all by itself is destroying our ability to pay for frills like ‘food’ and ‘medicine’.
chrislawson, et alia:
Nope. That’s the etymological fallacy.
It’s not even an insult, it’s an adjective.
The etymological fallacy doesn’t mean that words miraculously lose oppressive qualities just because some people use them in ignorance. And since when is an adjective incapable of being an insult?
OT
About the atheist groups suffering from members caught doing sexual harassment, # one million… now it has turned out that the lawyer to the team of The Scathing Atheist / God Awful Movies has been accused of sexual harassment, and the team has cut off their ties to him.
It is sad, but at least they reacted promptly when it was revealed.
And now back to The Lying Party.
The words “stupid,” “fat,” and “ugly” among others are both adjectives and insults.
chrislawson:
They’re using them as they’re used now, not as they were used back when the term was coined. Nothing to do with wombs.
So, what are these purported “oppressive qualities” you think it holds?
(Who is the OP oppressing?)
Never.
The insult is in the intent; no intent, no insult.
(You claimed some people were ignorant, without being insulting)
@19 So nice the to adopt a biblical solution Ex. 11:1–12:36 . Praise the lord.
Morales, you are such a twat.
Morales
are you drunk?
Are you, chigau?
Do you ever tire of asking me that question? Getting a bit trite.
Nevermind, I know it’s basically phatic and supposedly vaguely insulting.
Like the silly “bless your heart” locution.
Not the sort of thing that works on me.
But fine, you are personally of the opinion that one should feel insulted by something someone says though there is no intent to insult on the part of the speaker.
When was the last time I asked you that?
@39, chigau.
The good news is the heckling alienated absolute swaths of independants. If a little heckling turns off the center, imagine when they start carrying guns in congress. Is the GOP tired of “winning” yet?
@ 42
Definitely not a troll. Totally responding in good faith, as always. (Srsly, what does this dipshit have to do to be banned?)
Seconding SilentBob @44
Agree “hysterical” is fucking gendered. TBQH, I thought we already had this conversation, am I tripping?
Another conversation, one I know we had, is intent vs. effect. INTENT DOES NOT MAGICALLY ERASE INSULT OR HARM. John, if I accidentally roll over your foot in my motorized wheelchair (~400lb of machinery) and break your toe, does it really matter if it wasn’t intentional? The harm is still done. The toe is still broken. Well it’s the same deal with words, mate, your “intent” doesn’t erase the fucking harm.
God I hope PZ bans your disingenuous, unoriginal, boring, trolling ass.
WMDKitty, you seem excited.
Look, you want to think it’s a taboo word, fine, but your laboured false analogy is quite silly.
If you genuinely feel hurt by the very presence of that word, that’s on you.
Be aware that it was not I who wrote the post title featuring the taboo word.
There are certain phrases I’ve used before without realizing their historic origin— “peanut gallery” and “cake walk”. Now I wince or hesitate. The current utility (the Gouldian evolutionary contrast for co-optation) of these phrases as used by people oblivious to origin seems innocent enough, but upon realization from where such things stem, the utility diminishes or evaporates. That’s where intent-harm steps in.
I try to refrain from such phrasing, but may slip up from time to time. This is a place where such issues are relevant, but if I’m talking with some passing stranger and they happen upon such phrasing I’m not sure I feel comfortable doing a historical critique of their vocabulary. Maybe with a closer acquaintance.
@ ^ hemidactylus : Those first two examples are news to me. I do recall Sylvia Plath using the “peanut munching crowd” in oen of her poems. Will have to look into that.
I won’t call for John Morales to be banned & I think he does sometimes have some interesting and informative commenst here but I do agree that as we’ve long discussed and made a thing of there :
Intent isn’t magic
If someone is stepping on your foot, whether or not they intended to do so isn’t going to chage the fact that it hurts. Very much NOT an analogy original to me here.
“Hysterical” and variants are very much misogynist terms and “testerical” has been used by some to counter it
StevoR:
You can assert that all you want, but it’s the reality is otherwise.
Again: etymological fallacy.
Check your dictionary for the current meaning.
As for the supposed counter, I personally like it, droll as it is, but clearly it’s no less gendered and if one holds it’s the converse, it must perforce be misandrist.
(goose, gander)
—
And if someone is not trying to be insulting, then any insult is only perceived, not real. Not intended.
Again: false analogy.
Different things, stepping on feet and insulting someone.
Shorter: Intent isn’t magic isn’t magic.
(And thinking in slogans is not admirable)
@45 WMDKitty — Survivor
But it could mean that either or both are self inflicted.
Well one is assault and The other an accident.
What if he saw your machine parked at the side of the road, ran over and jammed his toe under it on purpose. Does it make a difference then?
@7 I hope you where being sarcastic about 401ks being “a good thing”. Aside from the already mentioned insanity of tying everyone’s retirement to stocks, which would end your retirement if we ever had a full blown stock market crash again, or just most of the companies its invested in went under, there are two other things that I have a problem with. 1) Much of the reason businesses get by with the sort of tax dodges, failure to pay employees decent wages, or even hiring people at all, is because “with” the creation of 401k programs, the original method of providing tax breaks to corporations went away – basically, they where incentivized to provide good retirement programs, health care, and to hire people, and that was how they got to have a tax break. Now… they just dodge taxes, and whine about how they can’t find a few million to offer health care, or real retirement packages, among the X billions they made that year.
My brother worked for a company that managed to pull some true bullshit. Every, how ever many years they had to wait, they “declared bankruptcy” to “restructure”, funneled a mass of money into golden parachute retirement packages for the current batch of, presumably incompetent (after all they where in charge when it had to be restructured, right?), high end managers, paid off a bunch of stock options to investors, and then… somehow didn’t have any money left in any of now defunct stocks to actually cover the 401k package for “existing workers”. As a result, my brother “lost” 3 such packages, over like.. 8-10 years, or something like that. Just gone, since 401ks are a “not protected, not guaranteed, program”, unlike the prior system, which was “required” to be accounted for first, even before all those precious stock holders.
As far as I am concerned, they are idiocy, and the stupid mantra among some conservatives that they trust themselves to plan their retirement more than they trust the government should instead be applied to f-ing corporations.
As far as I can tell the GOP wants to privatize social security because it’s a big pool of money. Normal people look at it as a program to do a task. The GOP and their rich donors look at it as the biggest pot of money available. Think about it. If only they could sneak their filthy little fingers in there they could be filching dough from every paycheck in the country! They’ll never stop gunning for it because they’ll stop being greedy.
What they’d like to replace it with seems to be some mix of their proposed school voucher program and the current healthcare program. Your money goes in but despite many promises and reassurances to the contrary, you don’t get as much out once it’s privatized. Gotta pad those piles of money the rich folk inherited somehow. And they want to give you vouchers which I assume are like getting paid in company scrip or store credit. It’ll be next to worthless and lots of places won’t accept it or will find a way to charge more if you have it. Normal disgusting rich folk shenanigans.
Skeletor aka Rick Scott is inadvertedly a great asset for the Democrats. So are the other evil clowns.
The beauty of it is even if someone wants to deny the misogynist impact of “hysterical” it’s still an incompetent term that fails to convey anything useful about someone’s state of mind. It’s as vague and useless as “th-g” applied to black people, when there are actual words that can be used to describe aggression that can be legitimate or not.
Die on that hill. I will just watch.
@48.
Her poem Lady lazarus to be precise WARNING : References to suicide, dark genocidal (anti~but-referencing them) nazi, very confronting imagery :
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49000/lady-lazarus
@39. chigau (違う) & # 40. John Morales :
(Triple asterisks and nyns added by me for clarity.)
I’ve been asked that myself by chigau (違う) a few times – sometimes when I have been and sometimes when I haven’t been* and I don’t think its necessarily insulting. It’s just a question and presumably if chigau (違う) didn’t intend it to be insulting then by your (apparent?) definition it can’t be. Or is intent magic when its you but not others?
Does it matter if someone posts when drunk as long as what they write makes sense? Is it the state of sobriety or otherwise of the person commenting or their logic, arguments and evidence that counts? Is it relevant? Is someone’s drunkeness as relevant or more than their emotional state eg the old infuriating “Vulcan”** shtick that only calm, coldly self-proclaimed “rational” people should be heard versus those who are furious or terrified by what the “vulcan” calmly – but cruelly – suggests or implies or states outright should happen to them?
Ultimately, does it matter whether someone typing their comment is half asleep or drunk or stoned or in emotional or physical pain or feeling grumpy or is in love or is feeling especially cold or hot or rushed or feels like they have all the time in the world or is having a particularly good or bad day or is half asleep or whatever as long as what they say makes sense, is kind, is evidence-based? Et cetera..
Anyhow. Drunk or not, insult or not? Depends?
It could also be that people are worried and thinking that you or me or others might be having a medical episode of some sort and drunkenness as an explanation is a reassuring one. Admittedly, there’s usually other lines and context in such comment making that clearer but still.
As for “blessing hearts”, well, there’s a particular mileu and cultural context ’bout that & we mostly get the gist I think? Metaphorically speaking. “Shaka where the walls fell” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok) and all because modern mythology = SF for me…Language, how does & doesn’t it work again? If very (metaphorically) rusty memory serves Nihongo (Japanese) is particlularly good in noting that nobody ever really knows what anybody else is really saying? Lacking actual telepathy (& maybe even then) we can’t really domore than our best tounderstadn and empathise with how others truly feel so .. let’s do our best and think and be kind to each other?
.* FWIW I often post comments when tired because I have trouble sleeping and my typing & previewing skills absolutely stink (as sure people have noticed – could swear the computer changes letters round on me!) or when I’m in a rush like commenting quickly before I have to go to work or out somewhere.. & fear I won’t have time or remember or be beaten to what I want to say in my comment. Oh & yes, whilst I don’t drink nearly as much as I used to, I still do enjoy the odd beer now and then too and will occasionally comment when I’ve had one or two or more. Plus when I am tired and emotional (when aren’t we?) etc.. I do figure that as long as people can understand what you are saying and meaning that is the main thing.
.** Of course, even in Star Trek canon Vulcans were’nt actually emotion-less and had extreme emotional states that they fought to control by trying to repress their emotions and be logical as well and of course there’s the whole Dionysian / Bacchanalian versus Apollonian thing which .. yeah, eschew the extremes and seek balance is probly good advice ditto Socrates “All things in moderation including moderation.”
.*** Phatic + here?? Unsure.
NB. + = Bloody double useage key thingies..
@54. Brony, Social Justice Cenobite : “Die on that hill. I will just watch.”
Except you haven’t just watched. You’ve spoken truth. For which, thankyou. Respect.
Agreed.
Use words caefully like ..I too often don’t but try to do.
Also neither a hill nor death but literalism aside.. /Metaphors agian & pedantry again and .. ok, I’m going to bed long after I should already have been in bed now again..
I take it Morales doesn’t bother talking to any linguists who would laugh at the idea that a dictionary definition magically made something not offend someone.
Die in a swamp / mire / hole / bore / cave/ waay undegorund might be metaphorically more apt but yeah…
Dying on hills, well, mountains is much more Gandlaf style.. A-n-y-w-a-y…
From Newsweek
….
Speaking in October 2018, McConnell called “entitlements,” a term usually deployed to describe welfare payments like Medicare and Social Security, “the real drivers of the debt,” adding they need to be adjusted “to the demographics of America in the future.”
McConnell also described the GOP’s failure on the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, as “the one disappointment of this Congress from a Republican point of view.”
…
And from CBO. Discretionary spending is $1.6 trillions, of which defense is about $800 billions. Yearly deficit for 2023 will be an estimated $1.2 trillion. So if we cut half of defense spending, and all other discretionary spending, that is what is needed to balance the budget. Ain’t gonna happen.
If as per GOP we can only cut spending to balance the budget, those cuts have to come out of Mandatory Spending, Social Security, Medicare et al.
The numbers just do not work. GOP Congress members still sign the Grover Norquist pledge to never raise taxes for any reason.
Doing the numbers tells us the GOP has no understanding of any of the issues, or mathematics.
You have a point but it isn’t any where near that bad.
Like most people I have a 401(K) plan. Just about everyone I know has a 401(K) plan. The only people I know that have the old defined benefit plans are retired government workers.
In most or maybe all 401(K) plans you have choices. A lot of choices. I’ve been in more, a lot more than just one. You have a variety of stock funds, Target Date funds, sector funds, index funds, mutual funds, etfs, etc. Plus if stocks aren’t your thing, you can buy a variety of bonds.
If you want, you can keep your 401(K) in cash. Or maybe even gold or cryptocurrencies, for some plans.
You can also roll your 401(K) plan into an IRA or Roth IRA, which then makes it all self directed.
I’ve never had any company stock in my 401(K) plans. If I did, I would just sell it and buy something else.
I have had company stock in employee stock plans, quite a few. They were a mixed bag.
One company did well and eventually sold out at a high price. One company is still around but its stock has reverse split once. One company went way up and I sold it all. Then it crashed.
The points I made stand and they are very simple.
.1. We have already privatized our retirement system. It’s not just 401(K)s but also IRAs and a variety of other tax advantaged retirement programs.
.2. 401(K)s aren’t simple to operate.
You have to have some sort of financial awareness to diversify, manage risk, avoid ponzi schemes (like cryptocurrencies), let winners run and sell losers.
This is going to be a problem for a lot of people who might not have a college degree.
But the world is what it is. Corporations have almost all got out of the defined pension plans.
You don’t have that choice. It’s 401(k)s, Roth IRA, IRA, or you can set up your own plans, that might be but probably won’t be tax advantaged, i.e. bank accounts, real estate, brokerage accounts, annuities.
While true, that is sort of irrelevant to the topic, which is why Social Security and Medicare are good plans and worth saving.
I’ve seen a whole lot worse and many times at that.
One well known wildly successful company got a new CEO, who was clueless and as it turned out, fired from his last VP job for cause.
His management team didn’t like scientists because they wore T shirts and tennis shoes, and cost a lot of money, compared to the minimum wage.
So they fired most of them.
A year or so later, the company was in a death spiral and almost went bankrupt.
The Board of Directors had an emergency meeting, fired him for cause, and spent 10 years rebuilding the place.
This looked a lot like what Elon Musk is doing to Twitter.
Another company (more than one) was just a hype machine.
They were always making claims of successes that weren’t real and future plans that never happened. Eventually the CEO and all the VPs were forced out, but not before their stock ended up in penny stock territory.
Oh Cthulhu, how wrong can he get.
Social Security and Medicare are self funding programs, paid by the payroll taxes!!!
They aren’t welfare at all.
They have nothing whatsoever to do with the National Debt or the annual deficit.
Which McConnell undoubtedly knows well.
I hate “privatization”. Forty years ago. when I became a military spouse, MWR (Morale,Welfare & Recreation) was run by and for the military members and their families. Active duty members managed the “businesses” and off-duty, retired folks, and spouses worked the stock rooms, cash registers, etc.
We could rent everything we needed to take our family camping quite cheaply.
The Enlisted and Officers’ Clubs were available and inexpensive for our use for parties, wedding receptions, etc.
Then the Rs pushed through privatization. The clubs, rental stores, etc. were mandated to make a profit.
By the time our kids were getting married, it was beyond most military members’ budget to rent the ballroom for a reception.
Even the Spouses’ Club could no longer afford to rent it for our events, or even to rent a room for board meetings (which used to be provided for free). We had to start going off-base for affordable facilities.
All of this was for the sake of the almighty dollar.
Thank FSM that my husband will be retiring with a pension from the DOD, and the TSP (a sort of 401K) will not be our only source of retirement funds.
As others have pointed out, the “privatization” of retirement is just another way for the rich to screw over the working class.
The telecommunications Robber Baron industry and current insanity of privatization of Student Loans are examples of how the wealthy become even wealthier by buying legislation to funnel public investment tax dollars into their tax-free pockets.
How the GOP destroyed inexspensive tuition, saddled students with student debt and lead to today’s educational disas5ers.
Roger Freeman a Reagan administration official declared the U.S. did not need an “educated protelariat”.Freeman claimed educated proteliats would become Nazis.
https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/
@ ^ cheerfulcharlie : Huh. I’d reckon its vastly more likely that educated people would NOT become nazis given education often means a lot of a critical thinking and can often provide the ability to see through and reject racism and bigotry..
raven @62:
See here:
Over 40% of US people of ages 40-64 didn’t have any kind of retirement account in 2020, and it was over 50% for ages 24-39.
And according to <a href=”https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2021/68-percent-of-private-industry-workers-had-access-to-retirement-plans-in-2021.htm>this :
A lot of people don’t have 401ks or equivalent. A lot don’t have retirement savings. This is a problem. We need to make retirement saving easily accessible to all, and easy to manage. (Or just do some kind of UBI for older people.)
Roger Freeman was an Austrian who fled the Nazis before WW2.
He claimed German University trained students became Nazis, he claims to have witnessed it with his own eyes. Yes, it is weird. J. Edgar Hoover though college education lead to many students becoming Communists. College education was not meant to be for everyone. Read the Intercept article. GOP weirdness didn’t start with the Tea Party.
@69 anat:
You need to be careful about what a “retirement plan” is defined as.
A lot of those corporations offering a retirement plan might be calling a 401(k) plan with a corporate match as their retirement plan.
According to this source (CNN), only 4% of US workers have only a defined benefit retirement plan.
Some companies offer both but still those are only 14%.
Motley Fool says the same thing.
It is 76% for public sector plans.
For a lot of corporations, defined benefit plans ended up meaning “unfunded liability plans” and the US government has an agency that gets stuck with those when the companies get rid of them in Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
To be sure, self directed plans like 401(K)s, etc.. have some huge drawbacks and they aren’t for everyone. It’s arguable if they are for most people.
Here is one fact. 80% of US investors lose money in the stock market.
We see it every day.
The latest blowup was cryptocurrencies.
The saying was and is, buy cryptocurrencies or have fun staying poor all your life.
I won’t give away the ending here but don’t put your retirement money in…cryptocurrencies.
raven, my point wasn’t that there were a lot of pension plans (I agree, there aren’t many of those left), but that many people do not have any kind of retirement plan at all.
I’d be ok with cutting social security…as long as everyone gets to invest in the same companies our illustrious congress people do!
But seriously, it was mentioned several times above, the GOP desire to kill SS is based on greed. If we go digging around in the so called conservative think tanks I am sure we will find plans for how to maximize the extraction of money from the new non SS covered population. There are fund managers drooling at the propect of skimming their percentage of trillions in perpetuity.
On the balloon again sorry but this – again seen on fb as a meme that I reckon folks here would find interesting :
Again any typos probly mine. Emphasis original.