| A lot of people at SI, who are mostly fairly well educated and affluent, have lost tons of money investing in stocks, Jagfan. I used to research stocks several hours a day, during the tech boom frenzy, in fact. To be a really good investor you need some basic grasp of financial markets, the way currency fluctuations may affect your stock picks, an understanding of what all the sectors are and how they are cyclical, etc. You can do a lot of research and pick what you think are good stocks, only to realize like a lot of other suckers that you bought Enron or another company that cheated its stockholders and misrepresented itself. The degree of control an individual has in this kind of scenario is extremely limited. Now I realize that in the kind of investment choices people would be doing with Social Security, we are probably talking about mutual fund choices, not individual stocks. Still, it is an extremely complicated process to read fund descriptions if you have no knowledge of, or interest in, investing. Some people would hardly ever sleep at night if forced to make these kinds of choices with their retirement funds. What you may be missing in the equation is that the woman's money may be pissed away whether she makes her own choices or not. If America is indeed going into a huge tailspin, with the enormous debt it is carrying and the European and Asian economies definitely threatening our dominance, her retirement money may be worth almost nothing whether the government sends her a check or she made the effort to invest her own money. |
