Friday, October 5, 2012

Obama Losing the Youth Vote

Young people are stupid. But they are also singularly motivated by their personal point of view. They have yet to develop the rarefied altruism so carefully practiced in high school and college. They still get that you belong to yourself.


You have to wait for them to get a little older so that they give up those foolish notions. Parenting is so hard. So is lying about how the world works. It takes a village..and a school system...and a media...and a political class to get it done.


2 comments:

  1. Today's youth will make decisions that affect their parents and every future generation. If society has done a good job, they'll balance respect for the elderly between fiscal responsibility. Otherwise, Social Security and Medicare will transfer into the private sector. Benefits will be available, but the government will gradually relinquish control of the money.

    If not, many of the baby boomers - including me - will find the final betrayal can only be our failure to react much sooner. The benefits will be substantially lower, if they even exist.

    Considering the loss of wealth, due to inflation and the inability to increase wealth due to interest on investments, the average working age before retirement will be the same as the mortality rate for seniors.

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  2. Jess, I hope your post was sarcasm. Social Security should never have withstood the Supreme Court, as there is nowhere in the Constitution that requires or allows the federal government to do our financial planning for us.
    As for your last paragraph, if you look back to the 1930s, when the Social Security law was passed, the life expectancy was about 2 years past retirement age. The fact is, that once you have started to collect Social Security, after 2 and a half years, you have collected every penny you have paid in, and every penny of interest it earned, assuming a reasonable return on investment. After that 2 1/2 years, you are collecting someone else's money. Social Security was designed to pay out for about 2 years, and that is all. It was never designed to pay out for 20 + years.
    The best thing that could happen to social security is the Ryan plan, which will leave those already collecting, or those close to collecting alone, and encourage (or force) those further away from retirement to plan for their own financial well being after retirement.
    If one has the self discipline to prepare for their own retirement, they will live a whole lot better than depending on Social Security. For example: if a person starts at age 18, and plans on retiring at age 65, that is 564 months. If the worker funds an IRA at $2000/year, or $167/month, and invests that money at 10%/year (which was not an unreasonable ROI before Obama and his merry marxists took over), when the worker retires at age 65, his/her nest egg will total 2.14 million dollars. If the person retired at age 72, the nest egg will total 4.3 million dollars. If the money is invested in a Roth IRA, the accumulated wealth and the distributions are all tax free. The government cannot match that.

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