An open letter to Trump: Stop the hatred.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Edit: Just after posting this, I saw that Mr. Trump had said something like this on “60 Minutes.” That’s good… but it’s not enough. A targeted  and specific message is needed.

Dear President-elect Trump:

trump1

I don’t know if you concern yourself with events on the ground among the “little people.”
In the week since your election, the news has been full of some terrifying and truly disturbing events. In a list compiled on Twitter by Insanul Ahmed:

  • Students as Southern Illinois University put on blackface and posed in front of a Confederate flag
  • A group of guys yelled, “Time to get out of this country, Apu!” at a Middle Eastern-looking man at a gas station
  • A woman wearing a scarf was told, “Your time’s almost up, girlie.”
  • A Trumpkin pulled a knife on a Muslim woman near the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • A white person called a black man a “nigger” and said he should be picking cotton
  • Students at Lehigh Valley High School were chanting, “Cotton-picker, you’re a nigger”
  • A white man approached a woman who appeared Mexican and said, “I can’t wait until Trump asks us to rape your people and send you over the biggest damn wall we’re going to build. Go back to hell, wet back,” and threw his cup of water in her face while flipping her the bird
  • A group of white men followed a woman wearing a dress onto the subway, yelled, “Grab her by the pussy!” and then proceeded to do so
  • Students at Wake Forest University were running around shouting, “NIGGER!” inside the residence halls
  • A group of white men confronted a black woman at a gas station and said, “How scared are you, you black bitch? I should just kill you right now…you’re a waste of air!” and another said, “You’re lucky there’s witnesses or else I’d shoot you right here.”
  • A black woman in Queens, NY was asked to go to the back of the bus
  • An LGBT couple found a note on their car saying, “Can’t wait till your ‘marriage’ is overturned by a real president. Gay families = burn in hell. Trump 2016”
  • High school teens yelled at a black woman to go back to Africa
  • A white man told an Asian woman at a gas station, “We won. Now get the fuck out of my country.”

Whether it was your intention or not, whether you want to admit it or not, you started this firestorm of hate with an implicit message that immigrants, Muslims, or anyone who is “other” or “less than” are not welcome in this country.

☞ And only you can put it out. ☜

I’m probably not wrong to suggest that most of your supporters are as appalled by this kind of behavior as I am. That these are the acts of the lowest common denominator of ignorance, hatred, and willful stupidity.

But these acts of horror are being committed in your name. And as President of our nation, the buck stops in the same office occupied by Harry Truman. With you.

There is only one way to stem the tide of this horror, which will only increase as the bigoted and the ignorant become more and more emboldened by the message that they heard during your campaign.

You spent countless millions of dollars courting the discouraged, the forgotten, and the disenfranchised, demonizing your political opponents. It is time to get in front of those same people who voted for you and personally tell them that acts of racism and hatred are not part of your platform. That they need to stop. That if they don’t stop, they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law for hate crimes.

You’ve got the money, and for you it would be chump change. Get that message out there.

Do this, and even though I didn’t vote for you, you will have taken an important step to becoming “my president.” Do it not, and there is no way you can be president for “all Americans.” Do it not, and you will reap the whirlwind in a political backlash that you and the GOP may not recover from during this century.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

A compendium of hopes and fears

Posted on by The Old Wolf

The election of 2016 is over, and the result I would not have imagined in a thousand night terrors has materialized. I couldn’t sleep last night, and put a lot of my thoughts out on Facebook in the hopes that I could stop feeling miserable and get back to bed. For better or worse, here’s an extended summary.

To my friends across the world, I wrote:

heart

Dear World:

I am deeply sorry. Please forgive us.
Je suis profondement navré. Veuillez nous pardonner.
Mi dispiace tantissimo. Per favore, scusateci.
Tá an-bhrón orm. Led’ thoil, maith dhúinn.
Es tut mir furchtbar leid. Bitte verzeih uns.
Jeg beklager så mye. Tilgi oss.
.אני מאוד מצטער. סלח לנו
Jako mi je žao. Oprosti nama.
Lo siento mucho. Por favor perdónanos.
Λυπάμαι πολύ. Συγχωρείστε μας.
Imi pare foarte rau. Vă rog, scuzați-ne.

I thought on this more than once:

litany_against_fear_by_kubuzetto

Donald Trump strikes me as the antithesis of all the best qualities Christ exhorted his followers to embody. In his first epistle to Timothy, the Apostle Paul wrote,

“A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach; Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous.”

If these are the qualities of a good spiritual leader, what then has America put into the White House?

A collection of tweets appeared this morning which lightened my mood somewhat:

George Takei: “The unthinkable happened before, to my family in WWII. We got thru it. We held each other close. We kept our dignity and held to our ideals.”

Michael Moore: “However this ends, that’s where we begin.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda: “Go through all stages tonight. You are allowed to feel however you like. Take stock of your heart. See you tomorrow. We are all still here.”

Stephen Colbert: “In the face of something that might strike you as horrible, I think laughter is the best medicine. You cannot laugh and be afraid at the same time, and the devil cannot stand mockery.”

JK Rowling: “Deep breaths. You’re not alone. There are many, many people on your side. The battle’s only over when you stop fighting. xoxox”

Kal Penn: “Stop it w: the moving to Canada shit. Double down on the country we love. If Trump becomes president, we have to get MORE involved not less”

Nina Las Vegas: “No matter who your president is, always fight for education, tolerance and quality. Votes can’t stop YOU from being good in your world.”

Jesse Tyler Ferguson: “I’m taking tonight to grieve for minorities, women, immigrants, muslims & the LGBTQ community but tomorrow I’m waking up ready to fight.”

Jessica Chastain: “The positive element from all this is that we can no longer pretend that we are free of racism & sexism. The question is, what do we do now?”

Barack Obama: “Remember, no matter what happens, the Sun will rise in the morning and America will still be the greatest nation on Earth.”

These thoughts echo what I designed immediately upon hearing the news:

trump

Lastly, I offer my own signature from the early days of email, one which I have always treasured and whose source is unknown:

Everything will come out OK in the end. If it's not OK, it's not the end.

May  God, nature, and humanity have mercy on us all.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Selling Snake Oil with Name-Dropping.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

I don’t like scammers. I don’t like woo-peddlers. I don’t like people who take advantage of the gullible and/or the vulnerable to make money at any cost. I’ve written numerous times about snake-oil sales, and even got a cease-and-desist letter from some law firm because the manufacturer didn’t like being called a scumball.

But they’re still at it.

Back in 2015, Forbes wrote a legitimate article about “How Fake News Articles And Lies About Billionaires Were Used To Market An Iffy Dietary Supplement.” Forbes complained and followed up, and the spurious website vanished, the cockroaches scurrying back into the darkness that spawned them.

For what it’s worth, the crooks didn’t focus on Forbes, they also used CNN and probably many others to hawk their garbage.

The thing about cockroaches, however, is that they keep coming back; if anyone survives a nuclear winter, it will be these creatures. There’s enough money to be made selling worthless nostrums that the scammers can easily afford to reformulate and resurface. and the immense potential for fraud inherent in affiliate marketing (which I elaborated on here) means that this plague will be a difficult one to eradicate.

I keep getting popup tabs when I visit Newser.com, and this is a recent one:

hawking

The name of the junk product has changed – instead of BrainStorm Elite it’s now IQ+, and the source of the farticle (fake article, or advertorial) is http://www.healthreportz.com/, a website that has nothing to do with Forbes.

It goes without saying that the product is worthless, Hawking has nothing to do with this junk, and the interview with Anderson Cooper is being spun to appear as if it’s endorsing this particular product – which it’s not.

The IQ+ website looks really slick, includes the standard Quack Miranda¹, and after you give them your information and click the big red “Rush My Order!” button, you are taken to the confirmation page where you provide your all-important credit card information. That page also includes this text:

rush

That’s exactly how it looks, and is so easy to miss that most people won’t read it, which is what the bottom-feeders are hoping for. If you do click the Terms and Conditions, you find the industry-standard “gotcha” clause:

In-Trial Offer: A trial offer provides the customer an opportunity to try our product free of charge for 14 days from date of order, paying only shipping and handling fees of $4.98(USD). At the conclusion of the trial period, you will be billed the full purchase price of $89.97(USD) and enrolled in the monthly replenishment program.

So that special price of $4.98 is really $94.95, and you will be billed $89.97 every 30 days because you signed up (without reading the details) for their convenient auto-ship program. You can make a Wreave bet² on the fact that getting a refund for unexpected charges to your credit card will be harder than pulling hen’s teeth – their agents will be trained to make it nearly impossible to get your money back without the threat of legal action.  This is how the kiz-eaters make their money, and frankly, Scarlet, it stinks.

I notified Forbes of the most recent iteration of this scam, and hopefully they’ll look into it. As mentioned before, there’s so much money to be made with scams of this nature that they’ll be back . I have no illusions that my little essays will do anything to stem the tide, but if even one person reads them and saves their money, it will have been worth it.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Notes:

¹ The “Quack Miranda” warning is required by the FDA on all nutritional supplements, some of which have proven value. The appearance of the standard wording does not mean a product is worthless, but a huge percentage of the garbage sold by nutritional companies have dubious value and all must carry the disclaimer.

² The Wreaves are a part of Frank Herbert’s ConSentiency universe. Their strict code of honor prevents them from gambling, hence a “Wreave bet” is a sure thing.

Shelf-safe milk

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Apparently, shelf-safe milk (the link is a plug for Tetra Pak) has been a thing since the 1960s, thanks to high-power pasteurization (ultra-high-temperature) and packaging technology.

I first learned about this phenomenon while living in Austria in the 70s, where they called it Haltbarmilch (storable milk).

almliesl-h-milch-2953849

It had a slightly different taste when warm, but when refrigerated it’s hard to tell the difference, and this technology allows milk to be used in countries where refrigeration and storage is difficult.

It’s not unknown here in the US either:

parmalat-shelf-stable-milk

I’ve kept a few of these in my pantry at times for those odd occasions when we happened to run out, and it’s more than acceptable. You can still buy it at places like WalMart; unfortunately, Parmalat had some financial difficulties, but is still alive and kicking.

Speaking of milk, I recall one of my oddest encounters was in Italy in the 60s, when milk was distributed in tetra paks (the Tetra Pak company is named after these oddly-shaped cartons, developed by Erik Wallenberg, even though the packaging itself is no longer popular.)

milk-tetra-pak-italy

I’m not sure why these were so popular, but they were. And Italian milk tasted really odd to an American palate, but I got used to it and occasionally miss the flavor.

Again, these were also used in other countries, but I don’t ever recall encountering one here, even in my childhood.

milk-tetra-pak

Milk: It does a body good.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

 

 

Servers are people, not slaves

Posted on by The Old Wolf

I’ve posted my thoughts about tipping before. I think it’s a bad system that allows restaurateurs to balance their budgets on the backs of their most important corporate assets, their employees. But as long as it’s the de facto standard, it’s important never to stiff a server.

But just as important as a good tip is the way you treat those who serve you, or wait on you, or help you in retail establishments, or answer the phone to help you with a transaction or a technical problem. And far too many people (witness the horror stories at places like Not Always Right) treat others in this category like something horrid that they would scrape off their shoe.

A few examples:

  1. A pastor writes on her server’s check, “I give God 10%. Why do you get 18?” She later stated that this was an unfortunate lapse of judgment and felt embarrassed about it, but Applebee’s, where the incident occurred, fired another server for publishing the offending check on reddit, even though no PII was revealed.
  2. A couple leaves a “tip” for a server: here’s your tip,” they said and explained that a woman’s place is in the home, as it says in the Bible, and that she should go home, clean her house, and cook a good hot meal for her husband and children. They even said her husband “must see another woman on his way home from a long day at his work” because she isn’t home, and told her to stop looking for handouts to feed her family.
  3. Some “Christians” have taken to leaving these tracts disguised as money as “tips,” thinking they’re contributing more to their waitstaff than crass pecuniary remuneration.

assholes

People who do things like the above examples are neither Christian, nor do they understand the very religion they so publicly claim to represent – and I refer them happily to Acts 8:21: “Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God.”

Then there are the people who are just douchebags for no reason.

  1. One sweet lady I work with told of spending almost 2 decades as a server. One “gentleman” she waited on told her that society had failed her because she was working as a waitress, and that she herself was a failure; he flipped a $5.00 bill at her and told her to put it into her infant daughter’s bank account, but that he doubted it would get there. Needless to say, he made her cry; this is what trolls do on the internet all the time, “for the lulz,” but it is beyond my capacity to comprehend how someone can do this in person. It’s a good thing I wasn’t at the next table, I would have been hard pressed not to stand up and smash his silly face.
  2. A man with “Esq.” after his name, proclaiming to all the world that he is an attorney, calls up customer service for assistance. When discovering his problem is a bit more complex than he wants (“Just fix it!”) he demands a manager. When he doesn’t get one immediately, he launches into this shouted tirade about “Now you’ve made me really angry! I’m documenting this call! I’m calling your CEO!” His douchebag wife even calls up to abuse some more agents about the same issue. And he actually does call the CEO, wasting countless people’s time and acting like a spoiled, entitled little brat until he gets heaven knows what. I’d love nothing better than to doxx this waste of human cytoplasm, but that’s not how I roll.
  3. For more examples, scan Not Always Right for the category “Bad Behavior.” (Link for the time-challenged.)

The solution to all these unhappy situations is pretty simple. It’s come to be known on the Internet as “Wheaton’s Law.”

wheatons-law

Seriously, just don’t.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Donald Trump, Brigham Young, and the meaning of a contract.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

That Donald Trump is a “shrewd businessman” – I can put it no more charitably than that – is no secret. He himself has said that he takes pleasure in reneging on contracts if, according to him, work is poor, or not up to snuff, or late.

However, among the 1,450 lawsuits against Trump and Company are a significant percentage of people testifying that his modus operandi is to stiff people who work for him. In the past, he has generally gotten away with it because he was the 900-lb gorilla in the ring, and most people didn’t have the gumption or the legal resources to go up against him.

But recently, this practice came around and bit him on the honus, hard.

Trump’s company chose to pay small contractor Paint Spot $34,863 on a $200,000 contract. Paint Spot rustled up some high-powered lawyers willing to work on contingency and waive their fees if they lost, and sued Trump. During the trial,

Trump’s legal team looked positively stricken when the construction manager admitted during testimony that the company had decided not to pay The Paint Spot because it felt like it had “already paid enough.”

Trump’s loss was delicious. It illustrates plainly the standard operating procedure of a man who has made millions on the backs of others, without caring who gets hurt in the process – one of the classic hallmarks of a sociopath, of which Trump easily checks off at least five:

Antisocial Personality Disorder, as defined by DSM-5 – only three of these are sufficient to classify a sociopath.

1) failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest;
2) deception, as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure;
3) impulsivity or failure to plan ahead;
4) irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults;
5) reckless disregard for safety of self or others;
6) consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations;
7) lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

Now, in contrast, let’s take a bit of satirical history from the pages of Samuel Clemens.

In  Mark Twain’s “Roughing It,” Chapter 14, we read the story of Mr. Street, busy with stringing telegraph wires across the rugged desert.

Unto Mormons he had sub-let the hardest and heaviest half of his great undertaking, and all of a sudden they concluded that they were going to make little or nothing, and so they tranquilly threw their poles overboard in mountain or desert, just as it happened when they took the notion, and drove home and went about their customary business! They were under written contract to Mr. Street, but they did not care anything for that. They said they would “admire” to see a “Gentile” force a Mormon to fulfil a losing contract in Utah! [Emphasis mine]

Mr. Street was in dismay to find himself in a country where “contracts were worthless,” until another Gentile (Note: This is the term that was long used in Mormon country for people not of that faith) suggested he go see Brigham Young. While in doubt that someone with only religious authority could help, he paid the President a visit and

laid the whole case before him. He said very little, but he showed strong interest all the way through. He examined all the papers in detail, and whenever there seemed anything like a hitch, either in the papers or my statement, he would go back and take up the thread and follow it patiently out to an intelligent and satisfactory result. Then he made a list of the contractors’ names. Finally he said:

“Mr. Street, this is all perfectly plain. These contracts are strictly and legally drawn, and are duly signed and certified. These men manifestly entered into them with their eyes open. I see no fault or flaw anywhere.”

Then Mr. Young turned to a man waiting at the other end of the room and said: `Take this list of names to So-and-so, and tell him to have these men here at such-and-such an hour.

brigham

They were there, to the minute. So was I. Mr. Young asked them a number of questions, and their answers made my statement good. Then he said to them:

“You signed these contracts and assumed these obligations of your own free will and accord?”

“Yes.”

“Then carry them out to the letter, if it makes paupers of you! Go!”

And they did go, too! They are strung across the deserts now, working like bees. And I never hear a word out of them.

While there is no evidence proving that this specific incident occurred, Roughing It is a semi-autobiographical novel detailing Twain’s travels, and through the satire some truth gleams like gems. I am inclined to believe the story has basis in fact for a number of reasons, most importantly that Brigham Young valued honesty and decried duplicity.

My mother used to sing me a little song when I was very young:

Before you make a promise,
Consider first it’s importance.
Then, when made,
Engrave it upon your heart.

I suspect my mother learned this from her father, and Linda K. Burton, general Relief Society President for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, heard the same song from her own grandfather

Honesty is one of the traits of a compassionate leader, one who says what (s)he means and does what (s)he says. I cannot, I will not support as the leader of my country someone who takes perverse pleasure in lies and deception to profit at the expense of others.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

This is not a solicitation call!

Posted on by The Old Wolf

“This is not a solicitation call!

Hi! This is Kelly from the Credit Card Rewards center! We’ve been monitoring your credit card activity for the last six months: Congratulations! You’re eligible for 0% interest on your approved credit cards! Press 1 to speak to a live agent, or press 9 to be removed!”

robocall1

Just Google “This is not a solicitation call” and see how many hits you get at websites like 800Notes, WhoCallsMe, and other scammer databases.

I noted with interest that the Economic Times of India just reported the arrest of 500 call center employees who were threatening the US citizens and siphoning off their money. That’s a good piece of news – I wish they could shut them all down.

I’ve often wondered if the people who lend their voices to these robocalls have any idea what their recordings are being used for. It would seem hard to record a pitch like that without knowing that something shady is going on. On the other hand, despite the chipper-sounding greetings, perhaps they don’t care, and they’re just as crooked as the people who are running these robo-calling scams.

It seems that there are relatively few operators. According to sources at the Black Hat security convention in Las Vegas, 51% of  these robocalls originate from one of 38 outfits. That gives some hope that the flood may not be unstoppable, or at least that a serious dent could be put into their operations if they can be tracked down and apprehended.

While it seems that no one is doing anything, the opposite is true. Last June the FTC shut down Payless Solutions, a robocalling scammer who was charging hundreds or thousands of dollars for interest-lowering solutions, often without the customer’s permission.

I’m grateful to anyone who is diligently working to make sure the criminals behind and involved in these despicable operations are stopped and justly rewarded for their nefarious activities.

The Old Wolf ha spoken.

 

Thoughts on why 401(k)’s are a bad idea.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

The following thoughts were posted at reddit by user /u/listenthenspeak, a millennial who has worked extensively in the financial sector. Reposting here as a signal boost for wider exposure. The writer’s thoughts are cogent and compelling, and backed up with ample documentation.

The original post at reddit linked to an article stating that millennials have little confidence in most major institutions.

The writer’s first comment was as follows:

I was born in 1977, it’s not just millenials. And for people who are teenagers now I can say at least in my experience that YES things are worse for everyone now than they were 20 years ago.

Even my parents who grew up in the 60s say that things are quantifiably worse for working Americans.

In the last 30 years we have witnessed (among other things):

  • The largest economic downturn since the depression
  • Skyrocketing housing prices that lock most families out of home ownership in major urban areas.
  • Financial scandals on an unprecedented scale (Arthur Andersen, Worldcom, Tyco, Enron) and hardly anyone was punished.
  • Two major wars. We fought in Iraq for 8 years and in Afghanistan for 13 years. We lost a combined 6,000+ soldiers with tens of thousands more wounded and spent 1.7 trillion dollars with 400 billion more that will be spent in the future.
  • The cost of education is becoming all but unobtainable. Rising education costs mean that millions are locked out of home and car ownership because of student loan payments.
  • The cost of medical care is unsustainable and out of reach for most families. A single illness even with insurance could bankrupt your family and decades worth of labor.
  • The loss of both unions and pensions. You can track the decline in unions and the decline in real wages across the decades along with the loss of benefits. If you want to chime in with “well I’m ok… have…” well good for you. Most people don’t. Most young Americans today simply will never retire even in their final years. A lack of social security, a lack of pensions, and a lack of viable options for saving (no 401k is not sustainable but that is a whole other rant) means that we will be able to save very little in our working lives.

For people that are curious, this didn’t just come about. This is a process that has been underway for 40 years. The top 1% of the country (and really its more like the top 1% of the 1%) have actively funded lobbyists and campaigns and laws at the local level all the way to DC to fundamentally strip workers of their rights, roll back protections for working families, undermine social safety nets, reduce their tax burden at the expense of everyone else, eliminate the ability for the elderly to retire in security, and have squandered trillions of dollars to “protect American interests” which basically means the interests of a few connected corporations.

So yeah…. it’s no wonder people don’t trust major institutions. Especially now that we’re witnessing a presidential campaign that consists of an almost Machiavellian woman running against a man who is almost literally insane.

The following segment was in response to a question about why 401(k) accounts are unsustainable.

Hey sorry it took so long to get back to you. Family stuff and I wanted to actually give you a good answer for this.

So to start I have to tell you a bit of my background. I worked in finance which among other things included working as a pension and defined contribution auditor along with working in a bank for a time.

I’ll start with my anecdotes and a bit of history. The piece of legislation that allowed the 401(k) was created in the 1970s as a way to offer more benefits to high-wage executives in lieu of additional payments. The intent was originally to create an additional way for high-earning executives to put more money aside for retirement as a BONUS to what they were already getting from their companies and from social security. It was never intended even from the start to be a replacement for pensions or social security. We have to make that very very clear from the outset.

It was designed to offer extra compensation to already well-off employees as a way to spruce up fringe benefit packages.

You can read a bit about the history of the plan here.

And you can check out the wiki here

Obviously by the 80s it didn’t stay that way and it soon became the norm to offer defined contribution plans to office workers.

Cut to today.

I worked as an auditor and saw the insides of plans for hundreds of companies and in my experience what I saw made me begin to question the viability and the sanctity of people always pushing the 401(k) as a way to retire. My anecdotal experience was that in a company of roughly 100 people you would have 1, maybe 2 employees who were maxing out their contributions. Those were always the higher earners, senior engineers, CFOs, assistant controllers, presidents, those types. The average account balance that I saw for employees was usually between 5 and $10,000 even after years of contributions. The average balance for executives (those 1 or 2 people) was around $100,000. My anecdotal experience seems to be a bit low according to stats because the average balance is actually all over the map.

Some figures that I’ve read say people have as little as $19,000 in their 401(k).

Investopedia has a decent breakdown of balances by age but point to the fact that it is always too low to sustain people in retirement.

The Economic Policy Institute

says the average balance is around $34,000 but this varies widely by race, income, and age so you have to dig a big, but again the takeaway is that Americans have almost nothing saved in their 401(k) plans.

Zerohedge (which I don’t consider a good source most of the time) has a fairly accurate stat in this case saying that the average contribution is a very low $2,700 a year, which is certainly not enough to retire on even with growth and dividends.

The GAO (which is a fantastic source) has a great read that is fairly dry. The tldr is that we don’t have enough saved for retirement and aren’t contributing enough

This talks about income from all sources not just 401(k)

So we’re contributing… not that much to our 401(k) plans so how will that affect us in retirement?

Well it won’t give us income.

Motley fool has a decent writeup saying that at current and average saving rates, the 401(k) will provide only around $4,000 a year.

That is supplemental income that might help you pay your electric bill or buy some extra groceries, but you certainly can’t live on that.

But that applies to everyone right? Everyone will at least have something in retirement right?

Not even close.

Around 50% of households in the US aren’t even eligible for a 401(k) and of the people that are eligible only a portion of them contribute. So you have close to 70% of Americans NOT contributing to a plan.

This is a structural crisis that needs to be addressed at the national level because more than 2/3rds of Americans aren’t putting money away for their retirement and of the ones that are, most will not have enough to do anything beyond supplement a very meager existence.

A full 30% of workers have literally zero dollars saved for retirement.

So at this point you could say, well why don’t people simply contribute more or get into a plan… there are Roth IRAs there are 403(b) plans there are ways to save right? And it’s because we simply don’t have the money. Families cannot afford to put aside even more money because real wages aren’t rising at the same time that housing, education, food, and healthcare are eating what we have left.

Most households don’t even have $1,000 in savings.

Most households can’t even cover an unexpected $500 bill

So how does that last part relate to my talk about 401(k) plans?

We as a nation are prioritizing the wrong way to save. The 401(k) is an addendum policy for wealthy workers that spread and became the “norm” but it simply doesn’t work when implemented as a main way to save. That is why I say that it is unsustainable. Of the people that do save (and you can watch the John Oliver on this) fees are a hugely contentious issue that can destroy people’s contributions.

It’s a broken policy for savings that needs to be scrapped.

So what is the solution? Well… as a former financial insider, banker, analyst, and auditor my take is this… we need a legally protected, quasi-independent nationalized system that everyone contributes to.

One of the biggest issues with social security is that it IS solvent but congress keeps borrowing from the trust with limited assurances that they can pay the money back. Social security DOES work if you don’t spend the money you collect for it on other things.

We need something held in trust that legally cannot be touched by Congress held in an entity similar to the Fed (quasi independent) that will hold individually numbered accounts for all of us. When we’re born you get something like $1,000 put into that fund and as long as your parents are working, from birth you get another $500 or $1,000 a year put into that fund until your 18th birthday. Then it’s on you and there would be 3 components. Your contributions, your employers contributions and the government’s contribution.

You could use actuaries to create a pension that has money coming from tax revenues (the government portion) you could include contributions you make to the plan (your side of the contributions) and your employer would contribute to your account at a rate that they could set (so this could be part of how they compete with other employers). You have a 3 legged stool basically. Three sources of money in and one source of money out.

That quasi independent agency would then have a fiduciary responsibility to oversee all of those assets (again just like a pension) and invest in AAA rated bonds, safe municipal projects, and a broad base of blue chip stocks and an index of all the funds on the market.

You could even offer a limited range of options like “low, medium, and high” for risk tolerance where the low would invest only in things like low interest treasury bills, municipal bonds, and AAA rated projects that pay a low but dependable amount of interest, medium risk could be a blend of index funds and bonds, and the high risk could all be stocks in an index fund. This would provide for growth and investment, ensure all Americans get a fair go at retirement, and ensure that Congress can’t purloin the proceeds with a promise to simply pay it back at an unforseen date.

We need to try something new and the private market is not the solution because when you try to separate people from their money you create perverse incentives. The government should ABSOLUTELY be involved in securing people’s retirements and ability to provide for themselves in their old age.

I know this is a long answer but I hope this was a well-thought out response to your question and I hope it encourages you to do further reading. This is only my opinion based on my experience in industry but I feel it is a valid opinion backed by economic data and experience.

No further comment needed by the Old Wolf.

To the millennials of this election.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Reblogging this with the kind permission of the author, David Gerrold. I saw this on Facebook, and felt it was so relevant that it deserved a wider audience.

So … I think I’ll blur the details here.

There was this person who was expounding on the upcoming election and why he wasn’t going to vote for Hillary Clinton. It was his first time voting, you see, and he wanted someone who understood and represented his generation.

He said to me, “You don’t understand — ”

And that’s where I had to stop him. “Look, I do understand. Really.”

“How can you understand? You’re too old.”

“Do you think I was born old? Y’know, I have pictures. Here’s me at thirteen — ”

“But times were different then — ”

“Yes, they were. You could get polio and measles and smallpox. An appendectomy was a serious operation. People smoked everywhere, there was no getting away from the smoke. In school, they taught us to duck and cover in case of a nuclear attack. Whites and blacks still had separate restrooms and drinking fountains. Women couldn’t get a legal abortion. Gas had lead in it. Vegetables were sprayed with DDT. You could be arrested for being gay. Yes, times were different.”

“No, I meant that protesting was a fad, not serious like — ”

“Excuse me? Do you want to see the scar on my scalp where I was hit by a thrown bottle at the first gay rights march? We also had civil rights demonstrations, anti-war marches, and rallies for women’s rights as well. That was no fad. People were dying — ”

“No, look, man — it’s the establishment. That’s what’s wrong — ”

“And you want to replace the establishment with what? A different establishment? Listen — when I was your age, when my generation was your age, we were just as frustrated and just as impatient as you are now. Honest. Am I saying we were wrong? Hell, no. We were right. Better than that, we were so right, we were self-righteous. We went around saying, ‘Don’t trust anyone over 30,’ as if somehow when you turned 30, you became one of them. Y’know?

“You know what we missed? We missed the obvious — that there were a lot of good men and women over 30 who understood the issues, and the complexities of the situation better than we did — because they’d been fighting that fight for a lot longer. We had emotion, we had energy, we had spirit — but we didn’t have enough experience, enough history, enough of everything we needed to effect real change.

“So we didn’t turn out for Hubert Humphrey and we handed the country to Richard Nixon. And a generation later, other people didn’t turn out for Al Gore and handed the country to George W. Bush. And what was missed — both times — was the fact our impatience was the single biggest mistake we could make.

“Hubert Humphrey had experience, he had wisdom, and he shared our goals. Al Gore had experience, he had wisdom, and he shared our goals. But somewhere, enough of us decided that he was too old or too much of the establishment or didn’t really represent us enough, or would just give us more of the same when what we really wanted was more, better, and different, even if we couldn’t define it — enough of us felt that way to hand the presidency to a much worse administration.

“So, no — it isn’t that you’re wrong. It’s that there are people who’ve been down this path before. We know where it leads. And it’s not a good place. We know what this mistake looks like. Because we’ve made it ourselves — and we’re asking you not to make the same mistakes we did, because each time we make this mistake, everyone gets hurt.”

And he said, “So that’s a fancy way of saying ‘suck it up, buttercup, you can’t have what you want.”

And I said, “No, but if that’s the way you want to hear it, then that’s the way you’re going to hear it. The way government works, nobody gets everything they want. The way government is supposed to work, everybody negotiates — and eventually everybody gets a piece of what they need to keep going. Nobody likes that, but consider what the alternative is — if some people get everything they want, that means a lot of people are going to get nothing at all. We keep trying that, it doesn’t work. Let’s go back to the stuff that does work.”

“But I don’t like her — ”

“I’m not asking you to like her. I’m asking you to respect that she knows how to do the job. He doesn’t. You can have your protest vote, that’s your right, but that’s letting everybody else decide who gets the oval office. And you might want to think long and hard about which of the two will build on what President Obama has accomplished and which of the two will tear it all down with no idea of why it worked in the first place. Your choice.”

And he said, “That’s not much of a choice.”

And I said, “The hell it isn’t. It’s a choice between experience and ignorance. That’s the clearest choice I’ve ever seen in an election.”

He didn’t have an answer for that.

And that’s the point —

‘I might be old, but I’m not stupid. And I suspect that a lot of other members of my generation feel the same way. We remember when we were impatient. And we remember the mistakes that our impatience created.

“Old people don’t tell young people what to do and what not to do because we want to control your lives — we just want to warn you not to make the same mistakes we did.

“But you will. Or you won’t. Because it’s your choice. Always.”

As a coda, another comment from a good friend of mine, Jeremy Grimshaw, also quoted with permission:

I’ve got an anxiety in my gut that makes it impossible for me to watch the presidential debate in real time tonight–not because I worry Hillary will do poorly or that Trump will do well, but because I fear that it doesn’t matter how well she does or how poorly he does. The fact that nearly half of all Americans take a person as cruel, crass, immoral, fraudulent, oblivious, and arrogant as Trump seriously as a potential national leader, that they have dimmed and warped their epistemic lenses so terribly that they aren’t appalled by the mere fact of his sharing a stage with her, fills me with despair. What could he say that is worse than he has already said? What depth of depravity remains for him to sink to? It’s not a matter of cringing at the content or tone of the trash he flings or wringing my hands about her responses being forceful enough. I just can’t bear to watch people watching him as if he were a valid option, as if he even belonged in the same arena as her. Remember, when she was in the war room helping call the shots that killed Bin Laden, he was touching up his spray-tan for the reality-TV cameras. We are about to offer the decorum of potential presidentiality to a man who raided the coffers of his charity to commission a gigantic painting of himself in a suit of armor to hang on the wall of a golf resort bar. The most absurdist comedy writers in the country could not conjure a more outlandish parody of the Presidency than the one the Republican Party has nominated to the office.

I can’t watch the debate because I can’t bear to watch America being so incredibly stupid. At a certain point, ignorance, made willful by moral and mental neglect and partisan indolence, crosses the threshold into blasphemy.

Two candidates. Neither perfect. One with decades of experience in governance, the other with nothing but bluster and xenophobia.

Please, please… consider so carefully what kind of a world you want to build, and vote for the candidate who most closely mirrors your values, even if it’s not a perfect match.

The Old Wolf has reposted.