My Rant on the Economy

401(k)’s, Roth IRA’s and IRA’s. If you listen to all the financial advisors on the radio or TV, they all are saying don’t worry you are in it for the long run, that overtime the market will recover. That is all well and good if you are in your thirties or early forties, but I retired in July and I have watched my retirement fund drop by over 10% since the beginning of the year. I have a good broker and I also take an active part in managing my accounts, can you imagine what it would be like for the average person and all they had was their retirement accounts and no Social Security. How would you fair in today’s economy?
Which brings up another point, our good ol’ Village Idiot and friends want to do away with Social Security and instead have employee directed retirement accounts. At least for me, I know that in couple of years I will be able to collect Social Security and a pension as a safety net if my investment drop. I say fix Social Security instead of scraping it, take the income cap off and tax everyone at the same rate and then have an income needs test when it comes time to collect.
Another one of our beloved Presidents ideas was to deregulation some more the banking and investments institutions, and that brought us the sub-prime fiasco that we are now experiences. There were warning about the outcome of such deregulation back when it was proposed, but they were ignored. You all remember the Enron disaster, what was done to correct the problem of “cooking the books”, all they did was to make minor regulatory changes and that was all.
Then we come to the tax cuts for the rich that the Republican are always pushing and how it would trickle down into the economy to create new high paying jobs. Yeah right, but there done that, with the Regan administration and we saw that it didn’t work back then and it doesn’t work now. A result of the tax cuts we now have the largest debit in history! And, where did the jobs go? To China, Mexico, Indonesia, India and Korea. Who would want to create jobs here when we now have free trade with the rest of the world. All the $40,000-$60,00 were replaced by $20,000-$30,000 McJob’s, there is no longer a middle class and it is the middle class that kept the economy going with their disposable income. As a result of President’s Bush economic polices we now have the widest gap between the working class and the rich, and we have watched the currents generation earn less then their parents’ generation.
Another great Bush idea was to change the way unemployment rate is figured. You are no longer considered unemployed if your unemployment insurance runs out. I don’t know about you but I would still consider myself unemployed even though my unemployment insurance ran out and I still didn’t have a job.
Lastly, Free Trade, the credit doesn’t just belong to President Bush but also to Presidents Clinton and Bush Sr., Free Trade was and is a bad idea from the very beginning. How could we compete with someone making a $5.00 a day? We can’t, I could tell that all the manufacturing jobs would be exported overseas and all we will be left with were service jobs or jobs that cannot be exported, that the playing field was not level. At the very least, require countries that want free trade to have: health insurance, retirement programs, and environmental regulations and to allow collective bargaining.