really stupid

Big business is involved.

The "final salary" a.k.a. "defined benefit" schemes that were the mainstay of pensions.

Unfortunately it is perfect sense. One of my minor pension plans has already gone bust, and the government (i.e. me) is having to fund the bailout. The bailout automatically chops 10% off the value, and almost eliminates the limited inflation proofing in the original plan.

I'm just hoping it doesn't affect my major HP pension before I reach retirement age.

How can you say "nonsense" with a straight face when you also have to ask "what pension plans". Clearly you are making statements when you know you don't know what you are talking about.

Not impressive, and illuminates the (in)validity of your many other statements.

... because the consequences of them failing were too horrific to contemplate. Good grief! Think for once!

Than God! Can you imagine Obama trying to actually get something done?

Idiot. I know what they are. What corporation still has them. The government has made sure they're dead, and not coming back.

Utter bullshit.

Don't worry, if you have more than a few years to go, the government will make sure it's gone.

Clearly you're an idiot.

I cant help it if you can't think either.

Ridiculous. Bailing them out guaranteed that it'll all happen again. Bigger.

Sorry to hear one of your pension plans has gone bust. My pension is still paying. It does not have any provision for increasing the payments to keep up with inflation. That could be a good thing as it is less likely to go bust.

Social Security is getting pretty shaky too. It is unfortunate that the workers that are new in the workforce will be extremely lucky to got back as much as they put in.

My advice would be to put in the max amount possible into a Roth IRA. ZI say a Roth IRA as I expect inflation will cause the value in dollars to go up and the income tax will be greater on the money withdrawn from a plain IRA.

Dan

The government could have included some sort of profit penalty. I don't recall the details of the bailout, but I seem to recall that the banks got money and then didn't lend it out in ways that were productive for the economy, rather they maximized profit in ways which were not in the best public interest ... duh! The shareholders ended up with a windfall.

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Rick C

Please explain my factual errors, making reference to *that specific* pension plan.

Hint: my facts are right; it is my pension plan after all!

Pot, kettle, black - particularly w.r.t. your above mis-statement.

I don't really care; the mount of money is trivial. But, of course the principle is relevant and important to other people.

Over here only Colonel Quaddaffi and Americans put money into the IRA!

That's true in many many ways. The financial system is still seriously broken.

As only one point, consider that ~0% interest rates encourage and enable highly leveraged buyouts and relatively pointless mergers.

l without the fellow in the car in front >noticing? "

People have done that in cars behind big trucks. However that depends on th e inherent vacuum behind the truck. It is called "drafting". It actually do es cost fuel, but in the truck, not your car.

You have to stay right in the middle or the driver might see you, and if he does and is an owner operator who pays for the fuel he might brake test yo u. That can be unpleasant because he has no damage but your car has a wreck ed front end and he can simply say he saw nothing.

Well that's the bleedin' point, isn't it? EVERY thing the government does works out like that. That's the nature of people with no stake handing out money that isn't theirs. At best it's done wastefully, but more often, corruptly.

This is at the very core of why government should not be used to redistribute the People's money.

It's insane to distrust your fellow man, yet expect a worse pack of the same lot to make it better. Madison said it in 1787, but people still haven't figured it out.

Cheers, James Arthur

I'm pretty sure you are wrong about drafting costing the truck driver in fuel. Race car drivers pair up like this to save fuel for both of them, or even a longer train. The guy in front isn't burning more fuel, he is burning less because of the higher pressure behind him than would be there if no car were following him.

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Rick C

Come on krw, please justify your statements "nonsense" and "idiot" in this context. All you have to do is point out the factual error about my pension plan.

If you can't do that, then I'm content to leave others to judge which of us is the idiot.

Or are you an active practitioner of "new age" rhetoric, where barefaced misstatements are ignored in the expectation that sheeple will forget them.

Whatever they may be, people on s.e.d. aren't sheeple.

But hardly relevant in the general case. The fact is that the only defined benefit plans left are government, and they're going bankrupt for the same reasons private plans are going/have gone bankrupt.

Mine is somewhat of an exception because it's fully funded.

Clearly you are. I don't give a shit about *your* pension. Pensions don't exist, in the private sector anymore BECAUSE GOVERNMENT KILLED THEM (and the businesses).

Completely false: about *7.3* *million* people are actively saving in defined benefit schemes. That's ~1/4 of the workforce - hardly small fish.

Source:

Yes: because companies have stopped funding them.

And therefore the company is a target for takeover in order to have its pension fund raided. That's still SOP for city M&A funds. That happened to me when Decca Radar was taken over about 1980.

You cared enough to falsely call it firstly "nonsense" and then "utter bullshit".

Now, it is true that government made *new* DB schemes unattractive, thus killing that *business*. But

*individual* and therefore *individuals'* schemes go bust because companies don't put in the money they promised to their employees when they signed their contract of employment.

l.

James Arthur lives in a dystopian parallel universe where everything the go vernment does works out badly. Right now the Mexican army is sweeping throu gh his version of California because the US army, armed only with muskets, can't put up an effective resistance.

Unless it is redistributing it to fund the army, the courts, the police or anything else that James Arthur approves of.

James Arthur still hasn't figured out how representative democracy actually works, and if he did he wouldn't like it. Some of the stuff that a majori ty of his fellow citizens want the government to do - like running a univer sal health service that's well-enough funded to prevent epidemics - don't m eet with his personal approval.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

My wife's little Merc (B180) does that automatically. I suspect that most new cars will.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney