That's because you didn't see the first toilet seat debate. ;)

[quote]have you decided to post in a clear and concise manner exactly why individual retirement accounts won't work.[quote]

:handball: should i take your silence as a resounding "no"?

where oh where oh where is tw?

Notice that Lookout123 refuses to deal with the basic fraud. Money is removed from the SS trust fund. No IOU is left. No interest is paid on that money.

Monies taken by the government to pay today's bills can be replaced in the SS Trust Fund with T-bills. IOW the government pays the SS Trust Fund interest on the confiscated (borrowed) money. All Social Security problems solved with no increased risk to the public AND with more money for Social Security. One reason why Lookout123 avoids this? No windfall profits to be made by stock brokers.

you ignorant SOB, have you even read my previous posts on the subject. it is the general opinion of most people in my field that a well designed and run Individual account system would make many of our clients less likely to invest additional $$ with us - thereby taking money OUT of our pockets, not putting more in.

ignoring the idea of paying back the IOU's? hardly. that is an option. if i've read correctly, that method would put the system back on track to remain solvent through the middle of this century. that would be good for anyone who plans on dieing before then. but let me ask you, how much do you trust the politicians not to raid the cookie jar? it hasn't worked up to this point.

have you read any of my posts describing the effects of only $100 month savings in a personal account of different types of funds? or is it just easier to ignore those real life scenarios and say i'm a stock broker so i must be a liar?

tell us, what specifically scares you about individual accounts? please give me specifics, not generalizations about MBA's, shiny shoe salesman, and mental midgets - tell us what exactly doesn't work, in regards to individual accounts?

Ignorant SOB? Posting insults when caught lying again? Clearly your god would not approve.

Want people to invest more of their retirement income elsewhere? Lower the SS taxes. Reduce the number from about 15%. Simple solution without adding complex laws to an already bloated tax code. Just another solution that involes no financial advisors - ie stock brokers. Lookout123 could not recommend a simple solution that provides no profit.

Somehow we will divert SS money to the stock market - and stock brokers will get none of the business? Selling East River bridges again?

Need to fix Social Security? Make the government pay interest rates on the money taken from the Trust Funds. Just another simple solution that will not enrich stock brokers. Lookout123 does not like simple solutions. No profit. No wonder he posts insults. Honest logic from a stock broker?

You want private investment. Its called Roth IRA. Its called 401K. Its called 403K. Plenty of private investment schemes already exist. Why would you advocate raiding the cookie jar? To fix SS? Even the president finally had to concede this private investment nonsense does nothing to fix SS.

Why more complex private investment schemes that only increase risk unnecessarily? Workers have a long list of private investment schemes they are suppose to be using. SS is the safety valve - a guaranteed nest egg - for those who failed in their private investment schemes. A problem the Wall Street Journal recently discussed in an article entitled "Theft From 401(k)s Is on the Rise". But Lookout123 pretends we depend only on SS for retirement. Therefore we must increase the ROI on SS money - increased risk be damned.

SS is the safety net - the one source of money not at risk - for good reason.

Plenty of private investment oppurtunities are available without complicating Social Security. Those shiny shoe MBAs hope we forget that little fact. Anything to get a piece of the Social Security money into their managed portfolios. Its called greed. Another reason for politicians to solicit legalized bribery money from grossly overpaid stockbrokers.

Calm down Lookout123. Your god does not approve of your routine half truth postings. A little confession rather than posting insults is good for your soul.

wow - i see you once again typed a lot but didn't actually answer the question about what specific part of individual SS accounts scare you.

Let me get this straight. you honestly think that if the government has all those$X00,000,000,000 to invest they are going to call lookout and say "hey lookout - could you buy 20,000 share of Intel?" give me a break tw.

TW, my default position on Bush is that he is not here to help the little guy. It's usually easy for me to see his angle in every move he makes, but I haven't figured it out this time with his proposals to change social security.

Why, in you opinion, is Bush proposing this change? Who is he trying to help here? What's his motivation? Do you really think his prime motivation is to support the stock broker lobby? I just don't understand why he is pushing for this, or how it's going to positively impact SS in any way.

i don't know bush's reasoning (he hasn't checked in with me this week), but from what i can see, the current SS system needs to be overhauled. It was not intended to be a retirement plan, but a supplement. the problem is that they take a lot of money from you over your career and what they give back to you in retirement doesn't begin to approach the amount that would have been available if the exact same money had been invested in a conservative mix of equity and bond funds among other things.

that can clearly be seen by the numbers that i've put in earlier in the thread. Those funds are not exceptional, they are pretty run of the mill conservative money managers.

what i hear as the main objection is that people will make bad choices with their money and not have any SS to count on in retirement. I think i showed what one could expect to be able to draw out on a monthly basis even if the market collapsed and dropped by 50% - still a hell of a lot more than they are getting from the current system. from what i understand, the proposals are for their to be a limited number of investment choices, all fairly conservative - similar to what is currently found in most TSA's.

from that standpoint, the individual accounts would work. i don't know what the smoothest way to convert from the old system to the new system would be, but their must be some solution.

but instead of looking at how to make something work, we've got people like tw screaming in the wind how this too, is designed to screw the little people and only benefit people who know how to polish their shoes (as if that is a crime).

[quote=tw Its called 403K. [/QUOTE]

I know this is a very, very minor point ... but the non-profit organization version of a 401(k) is a 403(b).

I have two of 'em.

wolf, i'm guessing that one of your 403(b)'s is from a previous employer? if so you will generally be better served by rolling it into an IRA.

it's kind of like the difference between the quik-e-mart and a grocery store. sure you can but things in each, but the grocery store offers so much more and generally provides better values.

FWIW

Ah, the devil is in the details. But we have heard no details from anyone.

I fully believe that Social Security will not be around for me when I retire (I'm 38) unless something is done to fix it. I'm in favor of fixing it or eliminated it today before I pay another penny into it. If it's not fixed, somebody will be left holding the bag, and I don't want it to be me. I also believe that the "rate of return" for social security is miserable compared to virtually everything else, but since SS wasn't originally set up as an investment fund but rather as a pyramid scheme, it's not a fair comparison.

You sound very confident that a conversion away from the pyramid scheme to private accounts is possible, but I honestly don't see how. The amount of money we are talking about is staggering!

I've seen Bush do so many things that blatantly favored corporate America over the little guy that I simply don't trust him. He's not giving us the details of his plan. I don't agree with those who say he is dumb. You can usually see the twisted logic in what he does, but I don't see it here.

Maybe he realizes that US stocks are not doing so well as a result of his fiscal policies that he wants to give them this shot in the arm, and this is a form of corporate welfare. Maybe he's trying to please that enormous stock broker lobby. :) Maybe he's going to set up funds that only invest in companies owned by his friends.

I am very dubious that his "plan" would help Social Security (he even said it wouldn't) and I simply don't understand his motivation.

actually they are doing very well. we are in an upward moving trend, certainly not a boom ,but that is ok. it takes time for people to be comfortable with equities again because of all the horror stories from 2000-2002. slow and steady is a much better situation than a runaway bull market anyway.

most of this is just cyclical and not easily swayed by the whims of a president. the market does what it does and that is all there is to it. the government can tweak it and make certain things more favorable, but there is always someplace inthe market to make solid returns.

in reality, if they brought this system on line, most of the money would have to be placed in treasuries or very,very large companies just because of the amount of dollars we are talking about. it wouldn't be wise to throw massive amounts of cash into the equity markets all at once. it would be a slow process moving from income vehicles to equities.

It's kind of a long story, but what happened ...

We had a bad fund company once upon a time. A breakaway group of employees decided that we wanted to have our own 403(b) with a very, very large company that happens to have offices locally. We were unable to convince the whole hospital to go with their stuff, but the hospital agreed to send our 403(b) $$ to our hand-selected company over which we actually had some control, and a wider range of choices of funds to pick from. The hospital even put up with the for quite a few years. Then they dumped the old financial management company, and went with a new one, one that was irrevocably tied to the bank that they also switched to as new customers. There was nothing wrong with our old bank, incidentally. I assume they got the $25 gift for signing up for the new account, as well as some keychains and pens with the new bank's name on them, because once again we got locked into a situation where the company had a lot of different fund offerings, but we were only allowed to choose from 10 of them.

Oh, and the hospital said it was too much trouble to allow us to continue to contribute to our nice plans that had been working out quite well, so we wouldn't be allowed to say what we wanted done with our money anymore.