Retirement Math
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0413/022-stock-market-taxes-on-my-mind.html
This is a link to an interesting (to me, at least) article from Forbes that does the math on how the personal retirement accounts that Bush was pushing several years ago would have performed through the recent downturn.
I'll assume the math is all correct (I'm not going to check it personally, but on its face, nothing sounds off-the-wall). This confirms what I have been saying for years, and especially over the last year - equities perform well in the long term, and you can't judge the validity of the whole market based on a bad year. People always overreact to financial events, and I hate hearing people compare the equities market to a casino, because that's not what it is, despite some idiot financial company executives treating it that way.
Unfortunately, the idea of federal personal retirement accounts is dead for at least a decade, and possibly longer. I fear that a generation of Americans has had their minds screwed with on this issue by recent events. That's a real shame, as I think we're all worse off for it.
This is a link to an interesting (to me, at least) article from Forbes that does the math on how the personal retirement accounts that Bush was pushing several years ago would have performed through the recent downturn.
I'll assume the math is all correct (I'm not going to check it personally, but on its face, nothing sounds off-the-wall). This confirms what I have been saying for years, and especially over the last year - equities perform well in the long term, and you can't judge the validity of the whole market based on a bad year. People always overreact to financial events, and I hate hearing people compare the equities market to a casino, because that's not what it is, despite some idiot financial company executives treating it that way.
Unfortunately, the idea of federal personal retirement accounts is dead for at least a decade, and possibly longer. I fear that a generation of Americans has had their minds screwed with on this issue by recent events. That's a real shame, as I think we're all worse off for it.