Plenty of people who ARE in the top 1% CAN'T. There are two things that American males can be counted on to badly overestimate -- how good they are in bed, and what savvy, clever investors they are. The average person does not have either the time or interest it takes to become an effective financial manager. And guess who will end up with all their money if you force them to try.
You're damn right about that one. People have too big of egos when it comes to investing. Everyone things they will be the one to pick the big winner that will make them exceedingly rich. And you're right, technical analysis nerds make absolute killings shorting those stocks all the way to the bank. But if you're too proud to make smart decisions, that's a personal problem.
Investing isn't rocket science. Its not even that exciting. Its quite boring, considering the goal is to invest in value and limit downside as much as possible. So its not so much stock "picking" as it is stock watching, waiting for companies that everyone knows are good to for whatever reason fall below market values.
I'm not suggesting they have to make every single stock pick themselves. Actually, most people have no business in the stock market. So if that is you, then you should be in mutual of mutual funds. They actually have very low cost overhead mutual funds based on the DJIA, NASDAQ, or S&P 500 at the most basic level. Does that sound like a high stress way to save to you?
On a side note its a shame that personal finance isn't a mandatory class for every high school graduate.
Social Security is an insurance scheme. Paying the premiums IS a form of saving. And savings rates have of course soared since the Great Bush Recession as people try to reduce debt and reconstitute recently eradicated wealth.
Saving with no choices in how to stash that money is not saving.
Blips? It takes a 100% gain to recover from a 50% loss. Ordinary Americans lost about $7 trillion from their IRA/401-k wealth over 15 months as the result of the Great Bush Recession. All but overnight, people's long-tended nest eggs were simply vaporized on them. For anyone within perhaps five years of retiring, this was a case of going back to square-one. That is not a blip. SS is meanwhile risk-free to the worker and it requires no extra effort at all. Adding both risk and work to the process is a highly undesirable double-negative. No serious retirement analyst will suggest that more work and more risk are the answers to anything.
So whats happened since those 15 months? Let's see... oh the stock market is nearly back to pre-recession values. Blip.
2% would all by itself be at least approaching the cusp in assuring that in fact the SS Trust Fund would never be exhauted and 100% of scheduled benefits could be paid in perpetuity. You'd really rather see another tenth or three in that regard if you were relying on growth alone to blow the trustees away, but 2% would at least get close. The options the SS Trustees project are labelled High, Intermediate, and Low. They would more honestly be called About Average, Below Average, and Way Below Average.
That doesn't explain how 2% is somehow magically better then 1.7%
The mandate is a requirement unless you have found and not reported a solution to the free-rider problem that others have not. Your upscale boutique-level health care is meanwhile not prohibited or restrained by PPACA at all. The general public won't be getting any, just as they don't get any now.
There are a number of doctors offering $50 a month plans for unlimited patient visits, testing, and actual doctor to patent time; which is available to the general public. The number is actually up 30% since last year too.
Again then why haven't you? What has kept you from learning, given all this interest you have? So let's take a quick peak. According to right-wingers, federal workers have the ne plus ultra cushy public sector retirement system. And according to the 2010 OPM Annual Report on the state of that system, total assets will continue to grow throughout the 70-year term of its projections, ultimately reaching a level of more than four times annual federal payroll, or about nineteen times the level of annual benefit payments. Sound like it's teetering on the brink to you?
"According to the Public Fund Survey of 126 state and local pension plans, which account for about 85 percent of pension assets and participants in state and local pension plans in the United States, those plans held roughly $2.6 trillion in financial assets in 2009 but had about $3.3 trillion in liabilities for future pension payments. Thus, those assets covered less than 80 percent of liabilities, and unfunded liabilities (the amount by which liabilities exceed assets) amounted to roughly $0.7 trillion. That share of liabilities covered by assets in 2009 was the lowest percentage in the past 20 years. By comparison, the amount of state and local governments' debt that was outstanding at the end of 2009 was $2.4 trillion.
That estimate of unfunded liabilities is calculated on the basis of actuarial guidelines currently followed by state and local governments. Another approach for measuring pension assets and liabilities, which more fully accounts for the costs that pension obligations pose for taxpayers, yields a much larger estimate of unfunded liabilities for those plans in 2009—between $2 trillion and $3 trillion." CBO 2011.
Speaking of free-riders, the non-union southern auto plants simply piggyback their wages and benefits on UAW contracts. They have even boasted about it on their websites. If they didn't march along just a step or two behind what the UAW negotiates, they would lose significant portions of their workforce to better paying union shops. The UAW is simply negotiating here on behalf of tens of thousands of piker-workers who don't pay a dime in dues.
Well, they have to pay higher wages, or they would have too high of an employee turnover compared to the other companies. But competition for workers causes wages to rise, unions or not.
Apples versus oranges? How many people have worked at the southern plants long enough to reach retirement? I can tell you that in 2010 it was 3,200 for Honda. What do you think GM's number would look like?
A lot more. I was saying I like Toyota's retirement plans better, regardless of "how many retirees" each has at the moment. Besides, actually having less retirees would be more expensive in an IRA type investment scheme, because the company is paying along the way.
I doubt you would have understood a single word Lucas was saying if it was among the first things you had learned. There has also been a great deal of development simply in terms of processing power since 1976. Dynamic general equilibrium models today reach rather deeply into assorted sticky and frictional factors as well as into the exogenous world. Horses of a different color from what Lucas was considering. It remains true in any case that micro and macro are different worlds and that deadweight loss is an element of the former.
Surely they take microlevel analysis into the picture?
Your original claims were that land is not variable and cannot expand over time, and further that its value cannot be negatively distorted by taxes, being derived solely from natural resources and the surrounding community. None of these assumptions can be upheld. If these are the rationale behind any sort of plan at all, then that plan is not well supported at all.
Well I mean't the area of land doesn't expand over time. Well it does, but only over millions of years.
We tax the value of property. We do that at the level that assessors deem the property of whatever sort likely to fetch if it were to be offered for sale. Assays and mining surveys do not enter into that process. Significant numbers of annual appeals do enter into it. The objection isn't in any case raised as to the capacity of imposing a national land tax, merely as to the justiification, practicality, and wisdom of it.
Since you're the expert, perhaps you could point out for me where the "economic effects" section is wrong.
Land value tax - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
