Retirement thoughts Past Present Future

[Larry Caldwell]

And look who the politicians are indebted to. Large corporations mostly, who can funnel anonymous fortunes through political action committees. They should be wearing sponsor logos, like a racecar. The Supremes never should have ruled that PAC's are 'people'.

While individual voters have contribution limits.

The only way out of this mess is to elect better. less bought and more honest candidates to represent us.

Don't get me started on Citizens United. SCOTUS handed the keys to the castle to a bunch of thieves. Sorry. Hot button for me.

 

[Gale Hawkins]

And look who the politicians are indebted to. Large corporations mostly, who can funnel anonymous fortunes through political action committees. They should be wearing sponsor logos, like a racecar. The Supremes never should have ruled that PAC's are 'people'.

While individual voters have contribution limits.

The only way out of this mess is to elect better. less bought and more honest candidates to represent us.

It is no longer fixable. But it could be better managed into the future.

 

[MossRoad]

The GenXers are pretty thin on the ground, but they got wild about reproducing and there are more millennials than boomers. The real problem going forward is the number of people who live off the underground economy and don't pay taxes. They won't have a SS account, and many will be sunk in penury. I already know a couple people like that. Their only choice is to work until they die.

I have/had relatives that had to work until they died or couldn't work anymore. Poor decisions when they were younger and/or bad husbands. At my last job I worked with about 2-3 dozen elderly women that were not so elderly when I started there, but 30 years later, half were dead and the other half were getting pretty old. Most of them were widows or divorced. A couple had disabled husbands. All of them worked a couple part-time jobs. None of them had more than a high school education that I know of. Over the decades, we'd get a few younger women in the same circumstances. And, over the years, I met a lot of men that had lost their pensions from the Studebaker debacle and had to work until they died as well because SS didn't cut it to support them and their spouse. At my current job, there are several older women doing menial labor jobs, but they are full-time with benefits, but still, they are 70 year old women on their feet all day. In just the 5 years I've been there, several have died. None have retired. A few were eligible for a buyout and took it. Then got other jobs somewhere else.

So, I'd say from just what I have observed, it's mostly women that are in that predicament, and I think it's because they relied on a man to provide for them when they were young, so they didn't work, didn't contribute to SS, they get divorced or the guy dies or gets disabled, they have no education or vocational training, and now what do they do to survive? Work until they die or can't work anymore.

 

[MossRoad]

I think you are putting the blame on the wrong people. Look to the House and the Senate. They make the rules and the changes. The people that is voters really have no say but politicians put the blame always on others.

No, the faults of the past need to be owned by the generations of the past. WE are the government now, THEY were then.

Would love to discuss further, but don't want to go down that path in this thread.

 

[MossRoad]

Did anyone start a business after retirement? My Mom is thinking about it and I find the idea to be good. She is active and says she is not ready just to stay home doing nothing. I'm going to help her with product discovery, website development, omnichannel retail, product management, etc. at least in the beginning (maybe later she will hire someone). But it would be great if someone shared the real experience.

re-tired

adjective

1. 1.
   having left one's job and ceased to work.

If you start a business after you retire, you're no longer retired, I'd think. You've just switched/continued careers. If you have a business, you have customers. If you have customers, you have legal obligations to fulfill. You may consider it a hobby business, something you do for fun and enjoyment. It might not even seem like work. But you're not retired if you're working for money.

 

[westcliffe01]

If I take my family as an example: My great grandfather fought against the british in the first and second Anglo Boer wars. Most people are not aware of the war crimes committed under Churchills orders where all the rural folk were rounded up and put in concentration camps (yes, prior to the German version of the same). Their homes and crops were burned, the wells spiked, the livestock shot and left to rot while the people in the camps starved to death. Later the captives were shipped off to godforsaken places around india and Sri Lanka where about 2/3 died from malnutrition and tropical diseases. Title to their properties was transferred to collaborators in their absence.

At the end of hostilities the survivors of the camps were repatriated back to ZA and many arrived in Durban. This was the case with my family members who then lived in a slum in an area known as the "bluff" a tall peninsula that formed one side of the harbor. My father (born in 37) was 1 of 4 brothers, he was the oldest, while all of my grandmothers successive husbands were conscripted into the british army and sacrificed on the European battlefields of WW2. All but the last of her husbands died in Europe, the last one (my dads father) never came home. He instead worked the merchant marine and went to Baltimore, where he died from TB at the age of 35. In 49, at the age of 12, my father left school to work for the railway as a messenger boy because the family needed more income than what my grandmother could bring. By virtue of my father working, his brothers got a full high school education and ended up marrying into wealthier families. My father later in life became a high voltage electrician and worked on electric locomotives and the transmission lines that supported them. He was forced out his job at age 55 due to affirmative action, bearing in mind he had 43 years in service already at that point.

Both of my sisters emigrated to New Zealand. My youngest sister recently bought a tiny apartment in Auckland at a cost of about $650k while she is 52yo. She is going to be a slave to that note till the day she dies. My older brother is still in South Africa. He has worked in different positions within a large investment company, starting as an auditer, given that he is an accountant. The company moved him around a lot in later years since the affirmative action people had been after him for years and they finally got rid of him at age 55 a couple years ago and he is likely not going to ever work at a formal job again given the political climate. Today they have crazy inflation, much worse than what we are complaining about in the US, thus the value of his currency is going to be dropping every day.

I dont think I am going to have much leisure time in my future, but I think that so long one has some control over your existance and not standing in line at a soup kitchen, one is doing alright. I have seen so many young people some less than 20 going the welfare route as baby mamas and living on handouts, never having worked a day in their lives. Some of them now in their 30's have 6 kids. We know some families with 14 kids, they were earning more than me during the pandemic without even getting off the sofa...

 

[California]

No, the faults of the past need to be owned by the generations of the past. WE are the government now, THEY were then.

Would love to discuss further, but don't want to go down that path in this thread.

But the generations of the past are who are the leaders in Congress right now. Passing out the PAC money and passing down or-else orders to those with less seniority. Present congressional leaders are out of touch with the population. This is an issue in both parties, not specific to a party.

Let's not name any names here in this thread but lets each of us consider this, when voting in the Tuesday primaries.

 

[MossRoad]

But the generations of the past are who are the leaders in Congress right now. Passing out the PAC money and passing down or-else orders to those with less seniority. Present congressional leaders are out of touch with the population. This is an issue in both parties, not specific to a party.

Let's not name any names here in this thread but lets each of us consider this, when voting in the Tuesday primaries.

Yep. I'll leave it at this. My opinion is that term limits and no retirement benefits for elected positions would clear up most of the problems pretty quick. So would a flat income tax with no upper income limits, and no cap on FICA, which is a paltry $147,000 for 2022.

 

[Torvy]

Yep. I'll leave it at this. My opinion is that term limits and no retirement benefits for elected positions would clear up most of the problems pretty quick. So would a flat income tax with no upper income limits, and no cap on FICA, which is a paltry $147,000 for 2022.

Only if term limits apply to all staff and bureaucrats, too. Most of the rules (laws) we are held to are created by people who were never elected and remain regardless of who is in office. I also think any contributions given to elected officials, whether 'gifts' or 'payments' derived from speaking engagements or books that are in any way related to their role in government should be placed directly into the Treasury.

Flat sales tax (fixed rate in Amendment) is better. You can always provide benefits to the poor, but income taxes are avoided too easily. Sales taxes get the majority of the underground economy and the idle rich from other countries also contribute. It also means that if Congress wants more revenue, they need to grow the economy. Tax collection costs go down as you don't need an army of IRS agents to deal with tax returns.

 

[check]

Sad stories about those women who have to work sometimes until they die, Moss. Never really thought about the cause in some cases that you brought up, namely that they were homemakers and never really got any job training or qualifications, meaning they have to work at menial tasks.

The running gag at our house when people ask when I’m going to retire is “I’m going out feet first!“ But that is because my job will be quite doable well in to old age, and in fact they may have to drag me out of there because they think I have become incompetent or Senile!

Meanwhile, as I think I mentioned before, the Canadian federal government requires that we start taking our pensions by age 71, but here in the province of Ontario that doesn’t mean we have to retire. So, there was a big controversy when the Premier of Ontario started making noises about cutting back salaries of Ontario employees if they started to take their pensions and still worked. Well, as you can imagine, that went over like a lead balloon. So the idea fizzled.