j_b

Since selective reading seems to be your forte, here it is for a repeat. Make sure you answer the points brought up before regurgitating the same lies about the cause of pension funds shortfall:

Once again, most of the debt in pension funds is due to the market crash and these pension funds have subsequently recovered a good part of this shortfall. Something that you have been told several times already and your ignoring it isn't going to make it go away. I can guarantee you that much. Public employee compensation is earned [as much as the funds that you put in your 401(k)] and it isn't the employee's fault that demagogue politicians didn't invest funds and preferred to give tax breaks instead. Also, a 401(k) or pension funds being funded by earnings has nothing to do with the value of these investments being sustained by taxpayer bailouts.

I am not deriding it, although I strongly disagree with the way it was implemented. I am saying that the value of a 401(k) appears no more sustainable than that of a public pension funds considering that without taxpayers saving the market from a much worse crash who knows where we'd be now. What do you think allowed stocks to recover their pre-crash value in the last 2 years? the roaring economy?

You are now doing well with equities because most financial institutions didn't crash as they would most likely have without a bailout (many taxpayer trillions in cheap loans so far). You were able to hang in there because your job survived the recession, contrarily to that of many people who had to draw on their reserves at the worse moment possible, especially if they had to pay a mortgage. You may have lost your job too if the market crash had been worse and had taken more of the real economy with it. During all market readjustment there has got to be losers, it wasn't you this time. May be next time.

The market is cyclical dumbass. Middle-aged investors know they have decades to retirement so if you 401k plummets 20-30% with 25 years to go, you don't panic and give up on the system. You really are a whiny little turd. ROTFL Don't tell me you actually believe the market would have rebounded without the bailout before the entire middle class was completely ruined. The extent of your stupidity is mind-boggling.

You ought to try what Dan Savage did to Santorum: Santorum

Is it legal when it's the chamber of commerce spying on you? Right wing disinformation campaign

Nonsense. Talk is cheap! KKK now claims that he was willing to see his investments go up in smoke just because his religion says that it was necessary to kill the stock market to save it from government intervention. You people are just a bunch of bad liars or just fucking retarded.

You must be one of the very few exceptions ... because most everybody else invested in the stock market was very worried and wishing for a bailout of the financial sector.

Don't know what you mean by this. I'm not a public employee nor do I have a pension. Self-funded 401k that is doing quite fine thank you. What a concept. how well was your 401(k) doing 2 years ago?

[video:youtube]Ege_RBhh37A

[video:youtube]vLido6G4c2E

How not to 'pass on the debt to the children', the regressive way ... a primer "Texas likes to portray itself as a model of small government, and indeed it is. Taxes are low, at least if you’re in the upper part of the income distribution (taxes on the bottom 40 percent of the population are actually above the national average). Government spending is also low. And to be fair, low taxes may be one reason for the state’s rapid population growth, although low housing prices are surely much more important. But here’s the thing: While low spending may sound good in the abstract, what it amounts to in practice is low spending on children, who account directly or indirectly for a large part of government outlays at the state and local level. And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance. And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average. But wait — how can graduation rates be so low when Texas had that education miracle back when former President Bush was governor? Well, a couple of years into his presidency the truth about that miracle came out: Texas school administrators achieved low reported dropout rates the old-fashioned way — they, ahem, got the numbers wrong. " http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/opinion/28krugman.html?_r=1

Meanwhile, in the real world: "The 401(k) generation is beginning to retire, and it isn't a pretty sight. The retirement savings plans that many baby boomers thought would see them through old age are falling short in many cases. The median household headed by a person aged 60 to 62 with a 401(k) account has less than one-quarter of what is needed in that account to maintain its standard of living in retirement, according to data compiled by the Federal Reserve and analyzed by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College for The Wall Street Journal. Even counting Social Security and any pensions or other savings, most 401(k) participants appear to have insufficient savings. Data from other sources also show big gaps between savings and what people need, and the financial crisis has made things worse. "

The Truth About Pensions by Paul Krugman Dean Baker has a deeply enlightening analysis of state pension shortfalls (pdf), containing a lot of stuff I didn’t know. The basic moral is that the official story these days — of years and years of huge giveaways to unions, resulting in gigantic, unpayable debts — is just wrong: to a very large extent, the pension shortfall has emerged just since 2007, thanks to the financial crisis, and even then it’s not nearly as big relative to future state incomes as widely imagined. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/the-truth-about-pensions/

My personal choice as well. Outstanding pictures by a legend of mountain photography and glacier science. A local boy too.

you first! your pension is no more sustainable than that of any public employee. your day of reckoning was 2 years ago when the stock market and your 401k weren't worth squat until the taxpayer bailed out the big casino.

whose taxes? certainly not that of the upper 1% of the tax bracket or corporations. I don't know what liberal believes this kind of crapola funny how you are the one spouting about 401ks yet you don't believe in the market for pension funds. Something smells funny ... is the data from 2009? because the stock market has recovered in the last 2 years, just to point out the ephemeral value of your data points. You apparently couldn't read 'cut the war budget, the subsidies to republican cronies, stop tax evasion, etc..' which points to something about you. Your attempt to paint me as only a tax the rich type is worth a thousand words ... so is your responding to Dean Baker's 'we need stimulus' with a 'public pensions and unions will ruin us'

on page 3: "it wasn’t the unions who chose not to fund the pension year in and year out, and yet it’s their members who will have to recalibrate their retirements if the benefits are cut. When I made this same point to Christie, he simply shook his head. What’s done is done, he told me" LOLZ. Republicans wanted to drown government in a bathtub so "what is done, is done". Fucking retards! As if it weren't reversible: tax the wealthy their fair share, close tax loopholes and make war on tax heavens, bring the troops home, and take back the various subsidies to big pharma, big oil, etc ...

I'd go ballistic too if I were asked to give up part of my compensation while Republican cronies keep getting subsidized with my tax dollars. As a self-proclaimed liberal, it's really disturbing that you keep missing that little fact (beside the inconvenient truth that public employee compensation being smaller on average than private sector employees). But, you keep confusing everything: "cyclical deficits are distinct from the longer term issues related to bond indebtedness, pension obligations, and retiree health insurance. These latter issues — size of which often has been exaggerated in recent months — can be addressed over the next several decades. It is not appropriate to add these longer-term costs to projected operating deficits for the purpose of declaring that states are in a crisis too deep for them to handle." http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=711

"As long as we let ourselves be boxed in by a rightwing agenda that leaves us searching for least-worst options, we're losing"

Probably depends on how much he weighs. TR10s ski pretty well and are very comfortable, albeit a little on the soft side. I used TR12s for years and was quite happy, although I had to buy a decent thermoliner to keep my feet toasty with thin socks.

and, of course, the banksters and other "experts" blame the weather. Laughable! It's a mystery anyone still believes these crooks. Among other British news: RBS bankers get £950m in bonuses despite £1.1bn loss. LOLZ

The Plutocrat's Coup d'Etat, Their Republican Allies and Their Democratic Enablers

it tells the polarity of change for a city average. That's about it.