401Ks are a disaster: Column

[Warpy]

201. The disaster was predicted by the left

when the scam first surfaced. The idea was to get companies off the hook for pensions for the workers they'd used up.

The stock market is a great idea, but only if you have a great deal of money to put into it. Working class people are simply not being paid enough discretionary income to save for retirement, not even with matching stock purchases from the company. Only treating retirement as an insurance rather than investment will provide workers with enough money to live on when they can't work any longer.

Pensions and annuities suffered the same flaw: they provided fixed income in a fiat currency that had the tendency toward inflation. Social Security COLAs stretch only so far when your pension's purchasing power has been cut in half by inflation.

Voluntary parallel insurance, administered by the government as a pay as you go retirement system, is the only way I can think of to fund retirement for working class people, although a way has to be found to keep all overpayments out of the grabbing hands in Congress.