401Ks are a disaster: Column

[Bigmack]

70. I was waiting for somebody to post something like this....

For years, my shitty little teacher pension plan was a big laugh to my friends working the the private sector. They had real, serious pension plans thru their company.

We fought like hell for every penny, and although our pensions have - for all practical purposes - no COLAs, we managed to hold on to a small defined benefit pension. We gave up stuff to keep that pension... work hours, conditions, pay...

(We did get a one-time COLA a few years ago. We got a bonus of 5 cents per year of service per month. Lemme see... 5 cents X 30 years=$1.50 per month. I bought an executive jet with my COLA.)

Then, the war on the middle class heated up, and - one by one - those wonderful pensions dried up... blew away... were summarily canceled.
Friends, with shell-shocked expressions, told how their companies.. big, prosperous, national companies fucked them but good.

I'm not jumping on you... well, not jumping on you too hard, anyway, but simply because the rest of the pay/pension situation went down the shitter in this country, is no reason to even question our pensions.

They are contracts. Contracts are enforceable by law. Several cases have come to the courts, and the courts have enforced the pensions. And they will continue to enforce them.

So.... gently... it's not the fucking teacher/public employee pensions that are breaking the system. Corporations are paying the lowest corporate taxes in decades. Corporations are making the highest profits in decades. Corporations have $Trillions in surplus funds. Corporations have offshored $Trillions of profits in tax havens, banks are sitting on $1.3 Trillion in money beyond their reserve requirements... drawing interest from the Fed.

Does that give you a hint as to who is screwing whom?

Public pensions are simply a shiny object dangled in front of low-information folks to distract from the reaming they're taking. And some people are dumb enough to be distracted.