Monday, June 14, 2010

The future is now - Remember when we still had a couple more years before Social Security needed to start cashing in Treasury bonds? Yeah, not so much: "Social Security cash flow suddenly negative." Change!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sigh, if only we could have privatized Social Security when we had the chance. Our retirement money could've been invested into BP or Bear Stearns or General Motors or Enron or Pilgrim's Pride or CitiBank or WorldCom or Merrill Lynch or Parmalat or Wachovia or Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac or WaMu and Daewoo or Ford or Lehman Bros or K-Mart or Delphi or Circuit City or Chrysler or Goldman Sachs or IndyMac or AIG.

Eric said...

Given a diversified portfolio, there's never been a period where a stock and bond mix has dropped in value over 20 or more years.

Meanwhile, Social Security already has a net negative rate. When it goes bankrupt around 2038, the program will only be able to pay out what it takes in with revenue, meaning that all the workers who paid into the system for decades will be suckers.

Hey, that's me!

Can I still put my money into BP? Because I'll bet an oily pelican that stock will be worth more than SS in twenty years.

Vermont Woodchuck said...

Yeah, Anon, and you could have bought Stutz stock instead of Texaco in the '20's. Flashy and highly touted, owned by all the swells.

Now SS is going down the tubes and you can't sell. If it was privatized or as Goldwater wanted to do, make it optional, the Congress couldn't have spent all your money.

So much for the benefits of Proggy life.

Eric, BP will be worth more than SS in a couple of years, considerably more.

Anonymous said...

After decades of the government raiding Social Security while giving tax breaks to the oil industry, their current comparative value ain't exactly the shocker of the century.

Eric said...

What are the "tax breaks to the oil industry"? Are they in any way different from the tax breaks given to the pharmaceutical or widget-making industry?

Or are they the same tax breaks given to every industry (depreciation, charity, tuition, etc.) but allowed to the oil industry, too?

Boo!

Anonymous said...

Is that a serious retort? That America's oil policy is no problemo, because Congress just as happily takes it up the ass from the pharmaceutical companies for 0.001 cent on the dollar?

Oil gets no special privileges that aren't available to any industry, is that actually the premise being sold here? The closed-door Widget-Makers Task Force meeting must have been SO classified, we'll never even know it happened at all.

Eric said...

Is this the same anonymous?

Tax breaks are evil!
Who said anything about tax breaks? Let's talk about access!

OK, do you know who took the most money from BP in the last election cycle?

Let's talk about tax breaks again!

Oy Vey said...

Pharmaceutical companies get the same treatment! Obama was bought even more than us! Besides, it's not about tax breaks, it's about access.

Access, which leads to... doughnuts and coffee? A rousing game of Jenga?