Social Security running in the red


From the article:

Data recently made public by the Social Security Administration confirm that in October, 2009, the program reached a grim milestone: six consecutive months of operating cash deficits. This is the first time Social Security has faced this situation over the entire time period, dating back through 1987, for which SSA posts the monthly data online.

From May through October inclusive, Social Security’s outgoing payments have exceeded incoming program revenue, generated mostly by the payroll tax (with a smaller amount coming in via the taxation of benefits). When a cash-deficit situation develops during a period that the program is still technically solvent, full benefits continue to be paid. The operational deficit is effectively made up with general revenues, putting additional strain on a sagging federal budget.

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Yeah, this is about how high unemployment levels are. Can't take SS out of salaries if people don't have salaries.

Can't hire people when taxes make the cost prohibitive.

Hey, I have a crazy idea......

http://thelibertyguardian.com/2009/12/soci...o-bust-in-2010/

For the third time in my life, the Social Security System will go belly-up.

The first time was in 1977 – well, almost. To head off the bust, Jimmy Carter got Congress to pass a major FICA tax increase – sorry, “contribution” increase – in order to save Social Security. The rate would be hiked in phases from 2% to 6.15% (times two: employee and employer). He promised: “Now this legislation will guarantee that from 1980 to the year 2030, the Social Security funds will be sound.” (http://tinyurl.com/ybksxs4)

Carter’s projection was off by a Georgia country mile. In 1983, the SSA program technically went bankrupt. Reagan signed a law that speeded up Carter’s rate increases, added Congressional employees to Social Security, and delayed the age of eligibility. (http://tinyurl.com/ybksxs4)

Unless there is another Social Security tax increase in 2010, the system will go into red ink mode and stay there.

The public has not been informed of this, which comes as no surprise. There have been a few scattered stories on the Web, but nothing sustained. The media do not want to admit that the jointly operated Social Security program and Medicare program are going to bankrupt the Federal government if they are not cut back drastically.

They are never cut back. They always expand.

Medicare’s Hospital Insurance program has been in red ink mode for two years. The public does not know this, either. To cover the program’s insolvency, the government is quietly funding the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund with bailouts from the general fund.

Politically, this creates a problem. When the Treasury taps the general fund, the expenditure appears on the budget – the on-budget budget – as an expenditure. This immediately adds to the deficit, meaning the visible deficit, the one that gets recorded on those wonderful U.S. debt clocks.

When revenues flow into the four Social Security and Medicare trust funds, the money is instantly handed over to the Treasury, which issues non-marketable long-term IOU’s to the trust funds. These IOU’s are listed as assets by the funds. But, through the wonders of government accounting, they are not listed as liabilities on the government’s on-budget budget. They are liabilities only on the off-budget budget, which most Americans are unaware of. This chicanery has been going on ever since the Johnson Administration (Lyndon’s, not Andrew’s).

The problem facing the politicians is this: when a trust fund is no longer showing a surplus of revenues over expenditures, it has to sell its assets back to the Treasury. The Treasury’s non-listed liabilities must be converted into money to send to the legal recipients. This is a red alert of hidden red ink. The public finds out. The debt clocks speed up.

The Treasury has no money in reserve. Every dollar that it takes in immediately flows out. So, it must get Congress to provide the money for the deficit-running trust funds, either by taxing or by borrowing (increasing the legal debt ceiling).

What’s a Congress to do?

HIDING THE BUST

The Congressional Budget Office released a report in July on the condition of the Social Security trust finds. There are two funds: Old Age Insurance and Disability Insurance. Think of them as “geezers and gimps.” Combined, they are called OASDI. The report offered a table of numbers showing inflow and outflow. It is here.

The table is tricky to interpret. This is deliberate. The political strategy has always been concealment. But if we think through what is being reported in this table, we can spot the ringer.

The ringer is interest payments to the trust funds. The Treasury issued the IOU’s, so it must pay the trust funds interest.

Think: “Where does the Treasury get the money?”

Answer: “The general fund.” Up go the debt clocks.

Look at the figures projected for 2009. Income from revenues (FICA) is $653 billion. Total income is $808 billion. Where did the extra income come from? Three sources.

Taxes on benefits: $21 billion
Federal employer share: $14 billion
Interest: $120 billion

This means that the U.S. government has to pony up an extra $134 billion to pay to itself: $14 billion in taxes paid on behalf of Federal workers plus $120 billion in interest. This is counted as revenue for the OASDI Trust Fund, but it is red ink for the government.

Neat!

Now let’s do a reality check. Subtract $134 billion from the $808 billion reported as total income to the OASDI Trust Fund. Why subtract it? Because this is not income coming from outside the government. We get $674 billion.

What is the expected outgo? $670 billion. The official budget surplus for the OASDI Trust Fund: $138 billion ($808b minus $670b). This is reported by the CBO under “Surplus.” This looks pretty good. For the Trust Fund, it is pretty good.

For the government, the real figure is barely in the black. The official on-budget, count-the-subsidy-as-a-subsidy OASDI surplus for the U.S. government: $4 billion ($674b minus $670b).

This is never mentioned by the CBO. We are expected to figure this out. No one does. It took me several minutes to spot the ringer.

Now let us look at the projections for 2010. Income for the trust funds: $811 billion.

Taxes on benefits: $20 billion
Federal employer share: $15 billion
Interest: $118 billion

Let us remove the U.S. government’s payments into the fund: $133 billion ($15b + $118b). This must be covered by the general fund. Subtract this from total income to the OASDI fund: $811b minus $133b = $678b.

The expected outgo is $703 billion.

The deficit for the OASDI program in 2010 will be $25 billion ($703b minus $678b).

Some people will regard the “Federal employer share” as non-subsidy: $15 billion. I’ll concede this in practice, although I still think this is money extracted by taxes paid into the general fund. Even with this money removed, Social Security will run a $10 billion deficit in 2010.

Social Security will go bust in 2010, if CBO projections are correct.

What do I mean by “bust”? I mean technically insolvent – you know, like the nation’s biggest banks in September 2008, before the government’s bailout and the Federal Reserve’s swap at face value of T-bills for toxic debt held by the banks.

I mean by “bust” the inability of the Social Security System to pay its bills by means of money extracted from the public by way of FICA “contributions.”

Think of the Social Security System as Oliver Twist in the workhouse, gruel bowl in hand. “Please, sir, may I have some more?” Unlike Bumble, the Treasury dips its ladle into the gruel and then fills up the bowl. For how long? Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

THE ACCOUNTING DECEPTION WORKS

The accounting scam of the Social Security Trust Fund has worked politically for a generation. It is not just the voters who are fooled. The best and the brightest in the media have been taken in. Here is an exchange that took place on the PBS show, Nightly Business Report, on March 25, 2009.

GERSH: A negative cash flow does not mean Social Security is in crisis. The program has built up an enormous trust fund over two decades. Barbara Kennelly is president of the Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. She says the trust fund is more than enough to cover any short-term financial hit.

BARBARA KENNELLY, PRES., NATIONAL COMMITTEE TO PRESERVE SOCIAL SECURITY & MEDICARE: The trustees look at it every single year, the report is going to come out at the end of this month. And you’re going to still see that we can pay those benefits way out. Say it’s not 2041, it’s 2040 or 2039. But we have that money. There is $2.5 trillion in the trust fund for Social Security.

No problem! There is a $2.5 trillion asset base. The OASDI Trust Fund need only sell a few of these assets each year.

The interviewer with PBS never batted an eye. He did not say, “Don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes, sister. I wasn’t born yesterday.” Yes, he was, and the scam worked just as well yesterday as it does today.

She said: “We can pay those benefits way out.” How? By selling trust fund assets.

You know the old line from the financial world. “Sell!” “To whom?”

To sell an asset, there must be a market. Here is the punch line, taken directly from the 2009 Report of the Trustees: “Status of the Social Security and Medicare Programs.” (In a printout, this appears on page 4.)

The Department of the Treasury invests program revenues in special non-marketable securities of the U.S. Government on which a market rate of interest is credited. The trust funds represent the accumulated value, including interest, of all prior program annual surpluses and deficits, and provide automatic authority to pay benefits.

What, exactly, are “non-marketable securities”? They are IOU’s issued by the Treasury on behalf of the U.S. government. As I mentioned, these IOU’s are not recorded in the government’s on-budget account. The revenues that purchase these IOU’s are.

But wait! There’s more! Pay attention to these words: “on which a market rate of interest is credited.” The Treasury applies a market rate of interest to a non-marketable security. There is no such rate. The Treasury can make it up as it goes along.

So, the trust funds are filled with assets: non-marketable IOU’s from the government, issued to a government agency. The trust funds are treated as marketable assets. They are indeed marketable: to the Treasury. The bill is passed along to Congress whenever the trust fund sells any of these assets.

There are lots and lots of these IOU’s in the Social Security OASDI Trust Fund. No problem!

This is a scam. It is an accounting trick to deceive the public. Does it work? Better than Congress could have dreamed back in late 1968, when the change in accounting took place. (http://tinyurl.com/yeh5sm5)

According to the lady representing the special interest group promoting Social Security and Medicare, Judgment Day is a depleted trust fund. That will take place is 2040, give or take a couple of years. Politically, a date this far out is irrelevant. Congress has been playing kick the can on this issue for a generation. There is no sense of urgency by the public, so there is no sense of urgency in Congress.

Judgment Day is 2010, when the general fund must start paying for those cashed-in non-marketable assets.

Let’s see if Congress will kick the can some more. Let’s see if Congress passes hikes in the FICA tax rates in 2010, or extends the wage base that pays the tax beyond today’s $106,800 limit. My guess: Congress will kick the can. The deficit will grow.

“HOW BAD IS IT?”

Those were Ed McMahon’s four words to Johnny Carson, decade after decade, setting up Carson’s punch line.

Here is the punch line – lines, actually – as delivered by the notoriously humorless trustees of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds.

The 2009 report begins: “The financial condition of the Social Security and Medicare programs remains challenging.” I worked on Capitol Hill as Ron Paul’s first research assistant back in 1976. The code word “challenging” means “politically unsolvable at the present time, so Congress will kick the can.”

To this assessment, add the first sentence in the Conclusion: “The financial difficulties facing Social Security and Medicare pose serious challenges.” What does “serious challenge” mean? Think of December 7, 1941, on board the U.S.S. Arizona. Imagine this sound: “Aye-oo-ga! Aye-oo-ga! Abandon ship! Abandon ship!”

We are assured that Social Security’s problem is merely difficult. (”Yellow alert! Yellow alert!”)

For Social Security, the reform options are relatively well understood but the choices are difficult.

The Social Security options are very well understood by Congress, but not the public. These options have been understood by Congress ever since 1983, when Reagan hiked FICA taxes.

The political choice was difficult in 1983, back when Reagan still thought he could balance the budget without vetoing spending bills sent up by Congress, which he usually signed into law. That was the year that the on-budget deficit hit $200 billion, a year before my 1977 prediction that it would hit $200 billion in 1984.

Reagan knew that red ink from the sale of Social Security Trust Fund assets back to the Treasury would push his on-budget budget even deeper into the red. He hiked FICA taxes to keep this from happening. Ever since then, Congress has played kick the can.

We ain’t seen nothin’ yet! The Conclusion concludes:

Medicare is a bigger challenge. Its cost growth can be contained without sacrificing quality of care only if health care cost growth more generally is contained. But despite the difficulties – indeed, because of the difficulties – it is essential that action be taken soon, particularly to control health care costs.

CONCLUSION

We are on board a replica of a 19th-century Mississippi paddle wheel steamboat. Nostalgia is always popular. The illusion of the good old days still sells. The engine is chugging faster and faster. The captain and crew decided long ago never to put the engine into reverse.

We are floating down the fiscal river of no return. We are moving faster and faster. Some of us can hear the falls ahead. The sound gets louder and louder. But our companions on board say, “Let’s party!” They head for the dining room. After that, they will head for the slot machines.

Americans respond favorably to these words: “Free” and “all you can eat.” That is what politicians promise.

Either the falls will get us (deflationary depression) or else an explosion of the overheated engine will (hyperinflation).

Our companions are still in the dining room or heading toward the slot machines. You and I should begin to move toward the lifeboats.

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LOL..... this works perfectly for companies where hiring people is the correct business move.

Those businesses that perhaps should be firing, or buying equipment, or investing in R&D, then perhaps these economic distortions are not such a good idea.

But tax credits are better than tax increases, so it's a step in the right direction.

If you make over 100k in any year, while receiving SS benefits, you should be dropped, and not allowed to reapply until your income falls below 100k.

There is no reason to be sending these checks to people that don't need them.


ps. I know almost nothing about Social Security, so something like this may already be in place.

It's not, if you make over a certain dollar amount, up to 85% of your social security benefits are taxable. So if you have a 30K pension and you get 10K in interest income and 15K from Social Secutiry, 85% of your social security is federally taxes at your current tax bracket.

If you only have social security and maybe some tax free income, then your social security is tax free.


The fact that Social Security is taxed at all is just awful.

You are paying tax on tax you already paid that have been returned to you at a much later date.

Brave, Don't you think if you have paid into it for 30 years.. you are entitled? You have earned it. Just think how you could of invested the money on your own

Yeah, that sounds pretty stupid.

The problem is a practical one. When people made this law, people died earlier. Now that people live longer, we are screwed. Of course they have earned it, but life is not fair. We cant continue to do social security as we always have. Of all the things to completely blow up and start over on.....this is #1 imo.

Don't even get me started on taxes. The worst tax by FAR is the estate tax. I hate it so badly, and it won't ever affect me, as my parents are worth around 1m, and I believe the cut-off is 2.5m.



Entitled? yes. But as Cane said, SS is broken and drastic changes must be made.

This is why we need reform NOW. We have to balance the promises we made to everyone with the fact that the program is mathematically impossible without massive cuts and/or tax increases, and the longer we wait, the more people are entitled and the more expensive reform becomes.

It's actually 3.5 MM this year, goes away next year, then goes down to 1MM in 2011 as the sunset provisions expire.

Right now there are bills in congress to set it permanent at somewhere between 3.5 and 5 MM a year. Plus if you have a trust set up properly a married couple can double that exemption, so currently 7MM.

It's still so so terrible. The estate tax should be illegal.

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At this point they should just be blunt with the american people. Just say "We're sorry, we fucked up. We are going to just go ahead and tax you for this other "fund" until those that are on SS are dead and then it will be on the INDIVIDUAL to make sure they have retirement funds available when they are 80"

SS is a joke ... like most government run programs.

It's probably not a very funny joke for the many people who depend on SS to feed themselves and, you know, survive.

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Logan's Run baby...Logan's Run

TMQ October 20

Two months ago, TMQ supposed that if Barack Obama supports a bonus giveaway to senior citizens whenever it is announced that there will be no Social Security cost of living adjustment increase in 2010, this would be a bad sign for his presidency. Last week, it was announced there would be no COLA increase, and Obama immediately proposed a "one time only" $250 gift to senior citizens. Set aside that this same group also received a $250 bonus last winter, also characterized as "one time only." Set aside that when the very same COLA formula that now says no increase for 2010 said a 5.8 percent increase in Social Security benefits a year ago, seniors sure didn't complain then! Set aside that the 5.8 percent increase in 2009 was itself a bonus, since inflation was less than 2 percent at the time. The key point is that in 2009, consumer prices have been negative -- prices are down 1.3 percent in the past 12 months. That means senior citizen buying power has gone up: Falling prices are the same thing as rising income. Yet seniors will still receive a bonus. Of course there are needy seniors -- but everybody on Social Security will get a check, including the wealthy.

Seniors as a group are the best-off segment of American society. Multimillion-dollar bonuses to bungling bankers are more outrageous than a $250 check, but the total expense of the latter is greater, while in both cases, government is taxing the less-well-off, or borrowing from the young, to hand a giveaway to a politically connected lobbying block. Our new president must learn to pronounce the word "no," or liberalism will be discredited for a generation.

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Logan's Run baby, Logan's Run

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Yeah but it's a funny joke to me that all my hard earned money that has been going to SS for the past 15 years and will continue to go to the black hole of SS for the next 35 years will not be available to me when I retire. HAHAHAHAH man that IS funny

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Only problem is, the trust fund is fake. There are no assets, just more promises to tax us more. That's what a treasury bill is.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/business...y/25social.html

The bursting of the real estate bubble and the ensuing recession have hurt jobs, home prices and now Social Security.

This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Stephen C. Goss, chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, said that while the Congressional projection would probably be borne out, the change would have no effect on benefits in 2010 and retirees would keep receiving their checks as usual.

The problem, he said, is that payments have risen more than expected during the downturn, because jobs disappeared and people applied for benefits sooner than they had planned. At the same time, the program’s revenue has fallen sharply, because there are fewer paychecks to tax.

Analysts have long tried to predict the year when Social Security would pay out more than it took in because they view it as a tipping point — the first step of a long, slow march to insolvency, unless Congress strengthens the program’s finances.

“When the level of the trust fund gets to zero, you have to cut benefits,” Alan Greenspan, architect of the plan to rescue the Social Security program the last time it got into trouble, in the early 1980s, said on Wednesday.

That episode was more dire because the fund could have fallen to zero in a matter of months. But partly because of steps taken in those years, and partly because of many years of robust economic growth, the latest projections show the program will not exhaust its funds until about 2037.

Still, Mr. Greenspan, who later became chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said: “I think very much the same issue exists today. Because of the size of the contraction in economic activity, unless we get an immediate and sharp recovery, the revenues of the trust fund will be tracking lower for a number of years.”

The Social Security Administration is expected to issue in a few weeks its own numbers for the current year within the annual report from its board of trustees. The administration has six board members: three from the president’s cabinet, two representatives of the public and the Social Security commissioner.

Though Social Security uses slightly different methods, the official numbers are expected to roughly track the Congressional projections, which were one page of a voluminous analysis of the federal budget proposed by President Obama in January.

Mr. Goss said Social Security’s annual report last year projected revenue would more than cover payouts until at least 2016 because economists expected a quicker, stronger recovery from the crisis. Officials foresaw an average unemployment rate of 8.2 percent in 2009 and 8.8 percent this year, though unemployment is hovering at nearly 10 percent.

The trustees did foresee, in late 2008, that the recession would be severe enough to deplete Social Security’s funds more quickly than previously projected. They moved the year of reckoning forward, to 2037 from 2041. Mr. Goss declined to reveal the contents of the forthcoming annual report, but said people should not expect the date to lurch forward again.

The long-term costs of Social Security present further problems for politicians, who are already struggling over how to reduce the nation’s debt. The national predicament echoes that of many European governments, which are facing market pressure to re-examine their commitments to generous pensions over extended retirements.

The United States’ soaring debt — propelled by tax cuts, wars and large expenditures to help banks and the housing market — has become a hot issue as Democrats gauge their vulnerability in the coming elections. President Obama has appointed a bipartisan commission to examine the debt problem, including Social Security, and make recommendations on how to trim the nation’s debt by Dec. 1, a few weeks after the midterm Congressional elections.

Although Social Security is often said to have a “trust fund,” the term really serves as an accounting device, to track the pay-as-you-go program’s revenue and outlays over time. Its so-called balance is, in fact, a history of its vast cash flows: the sum of all of its revenue in the past, minus all of its outlays. The balance is currently about $2.5 trillion because after the early 1980s the program had surplus revenue, year after year.

Now that accumulated revenue will slowly start to shrink, as outlays start to exceed revenue. By law, Social Security cannot pay out more than its balance in any given year.

For accounting purposes, the system’s accumulated revenue is placed in Treasury securities.

In a year like this, the paper gains from the interest earned on the securities will more than cover the difference between what it takes in and pays out.

Mr. Goss, the actuary, emphasized that even the $29 billion shortfall projected for this year was small, relative to the roughly $700 billion that would flow in and out of the system. The system, he added, has a balance of about $2.5 trillion that will take decades to deplete. Mr. Goss said that large cushion could start to grow again if the economy recovers briskly.

Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office’s projection shows the ravages of the recession easing in the next few years, with small surpluses reappearing briefly in 2014 and 2015.

After that, demographic forces are expected to overtake the fund, as more and more baby boomers leave the work force, stop paying into the program and start collecting their benefits. At that point, outlays will exceed revenue every year, no matter how well the economy performs.

Mr. Greenspan recalled in an interview that the sour economy of the late 1970s had taken the program close to insolvency when the commission he led set to work in 1982. It had no contingency reserve then, and the group had to work quickly. He said there were only three choices: raise taxes, lower benefits or bail out the program by tapping general revenue.

The easiest choice, politically, would have been “solving the problem with the stroke of a pen, by printing the money,” Mr. Greenspan said. But one member of the commission, Claude Pepper, then a House representative, blocked that approach because he feared it would undermine Social Security, changing it from a respected, self-sustaining old-age program into welfare.

Mr. Greenspan said that the same three choices exist today — though there is more time now for the painful deliberations.

“Even if the trust fund level goes down, there’s no action required, until the level of the trust fund gets to zero,” he said. “At that point, you have to cut benefits, because benefits have to equal receipts.”

I really don't see how SS could be in trouble.

When Bush lied about needing to fix it, the Democrats all explained that it was in perfect health and there was no need to fix anything.


I mean it's not like the current administration has started spending even more money, or started any new programs that will increase the debt burden on the treasury any time soon...


I'm sure it will be fine if we just ignore it.

This is my exact position on "Global Warming".

except, y'know, his proposed fix was to add a bunch of administration costs and make it an even more unfair deal than it already is.

I want to see it happen, though. so it dies sooner.

The objection from the Left was NEVER "He's doing it wrong"

Their objection was universally "There's nothing to fix"

well, that's just plain inaccurate ("universally"). the argument I remember hearing was that it would be too costly to implement it initially.

and my argument, if we're moving into a self-managed model, is that we may as well not have the vig at all and just let people manage their own investments. I would say that most of the hang-up for individual investors is getting scared and manipulated into transacting too often (paying the bid/ask spread + broker commissions), NOT that they are less capable than the "experts" at stock picking.

I think the biggest argument from the Dems was people are stupid and can't manage their own money. Which is fairly accurate actually.

I am sure the fox is the best judge of who should guard the chicken coop.

Bush's proposal was to take something like 5% of the money you pay yourself into SS and be allowed to pick which mutual fund you wanted to invest it in from a pool of x number of funds.



What exactly would that cost?

'Eyyyyyyyyyy

I have to leave soon, and I don't want to leave guapo pissed off at me.

My two options:
Fix social security so it uses a more accurate representation of inflation with a little room for the variance in size between generations.
Abolish it and substitute some kind of education regarding investments and risk. It wouldn't take that much effort, seriously.

And honestly, if we were going with option two, I think advising (fitting a person's investments to their risk profile) has a BIG, legitimate place in that equation.

no idea. I imagine the dems had some math behind it, but this was like 2003, and I gotta go run my parents' shop now.

if you want more participation in the market via mutual funds, the cheapest fix is: make all the defined contribution paperwork (upon new employment) an opt-OUT process, rather than default to no participation.

Wow are you living in a dream world.

There are people right now going to doctors office demanding free health care.

And you want them to take a class on risk management by diversifying risk through a balanced bond/stock portfolio with an extra credit class on small cap vs foreign investment stocks?

I've been through that and more. It isn't tough, and it can easily be subbed in for the half-assed US history classes my high school made mandatory for seniors. There's some pretty daunting math in the underpinnings, but you don't really need to be able to do any of that to hold your own and avoid the snake oil. As with a bunch of other topics, focus on teaching people the basic concepts, not memorization of random facts and equations.

Oh, and I'm back for now.

And stay away from foreign and small cap stocks.

When the average person in America can balance their checkbook and fix the blinking light on their VCR, then I think they will be ready to consider handling making an educated choice on picking a mutual fund based on performance ( not indicative of future performance ).


Until then I only want to encourage them to vote for the people who will be making the major decisions that will effect the economic realities for the entire world

Their what?

I recognize that people are currently too dumb to make these decisions, but I don't consider option two an impossibility. I think we all agree that personal finance education is something we need to implement somewhere in the process.

Also, who balances their checkbook these days? http://www.mint.com/

Like I said, I'm on board with a fair, low cost approach to social security. What we have now is quite obviously an intentionally obfuscated process that operates as a ponzi scheme.



Main Entry: check·book
Pronunciation: \ˈchek-ˌbu̇k\
Function: noun
Date: circa 1846
: facebook for people from the Czech Republic

LOL, I kind of forgot about that

Oh, you should see my spreadsheets...

Or if you're not comfortable with mint... http://www.gnucash.org/

Say what now?

401Ks have been such a disaster for America. No wonder people prefer a bankrupt program to investing their own money.

Oh wait.

I am shocked that you waited this long to respond to all of my nonsensical babbling.