You Could Have Owned Your Own Retirement Account
Interesting point of fact from Ace.
For the cost of Obama’s “stimulus” package and a couple hundred billion more, we could have implemented private social security accounts, paying the transition costs of this system rather than pissing the money away on studying turtle cocks. (Ah, remember the halcyon days when we thought $1.1 trillion in government spending was outsized and irresponsible? How young we were.)
What would that have bought us?
A huge injection of capital into the markets, and
Millions of Americans would now have their own, owned retirement accounts, bought into the system when stock prices are near their bottoms.
Think about that last part. Investing in the markets when Bush proposed it turns out to have been a bad deal — we would have been buying in at or near the top of the market. Now we’d be buying in near the bottom. (Only near, I fear; still, at 6500 points, the Dow blue chips have a lot of upside, and will probably go back to the 12,000 level within a decade. Not furious growth, but pretty solid.)
The growth wouldn’t have to be furious. It would easily beat the 2-4 percent that Social Security gives at its best. The capital injection would have gone a long way toward solving the credit problems, would have immediately given the market confidence that people weren’t going to hide their cash under their mattresses, and would have raised the bottom the market will eventually find. Granted, we wouldn’t have been able to buy in at today’s low of 6500, but we could have bought in at, say, 8000 a month ago which still would have given millions of Americans steady growth in their retirement funds without expanding the government one little bit.
But no. The Democrats just had to shove their stupid, stupid Keynesian stimulus bill/vote buying scheme down our throats without regard for what we wanted or what it would cost us and our children.
Remember that when your retirement fund turns to ash and you have to move in with your kids.
Other Posts of Interest:
- Two Months After Saying the Marketplace is Important, the President Decides to Ignore It.
- Yeah, We’re Idiots for Listening to Them
Category: Our New Democratic Overlords, The Economy and Your Money
