I don't agree with your comment on defined benefit plans. The fact that you can define it doesn't make it rational. Defined contributions plans, which also are easily defined as compensation, impose no future risk nor future taxes. The catastrophes in California and elsewhere (including in my own state of Washington) are self evident. And the potential for abuse is significant and generally not known to the public (legal and common in Calif. and Wash. via one trick or another to jack up the final number used in the formula or to defer funding until some future date).
You must realize that defined contribution plans, a kin to an IRA, is all about personal responsibility. And those plans are not only defined as part of the compensation package, but paid for contemporaneously. No avenue for abuse, no triggering of a future default or bankruptcy, nothing to raid. I don't think you have any sound argument that can top the complete personal responsibility of maintaining one's own self-directed retirement plan.
My reference to having medical procedure costs to be discoverable has to do with allowing millions of people to price shop for medical care and thus become empowered to pick and choose. I would love to see some form of health care which largely worked out as major medical (i.e. big deductibles for most things) and thus price discovery mattered greatly to consumers, and those who took care of themselves benefit not only from better health but financially as well. People do this when the shop for cars and other major items.
Allow people to opt out of the retirement portion of SS -- perhaps 80% of it? Let me invest it myself.
In the end, however, I say follow the money. The dramatic shift in wealth in the past 40 years does not point to the 350 million, it points to 1 million. People did not say corporations were people, the corporate controlled gov't did.
There is a lot people could to to be personally responsible for their lives. Save money. (Eliminate the Fed). You could eliminate FDIC insurance, but the gov't allows the obfuscation of solvency and fraud (which goes back to my previous post). You can't make people responsible for knowing what's happening to their money when it's legally a secret and people committing fraud know they are immune (i.e. TBTF banks).
So long as gov't works for the elite, what the people do to be responsible for themselves will only go so far. Say gov't is debasing your currency, and you buy gold. Sounds smart unless the gov't confiscates it. Again, the rules changed from without.
I'm a believer in personal responsibility and accountability, and personal education. I avoid MSM like the plague. I am conscious when I walk around. But I'm surrounded by idiots -g- And you can't change others...
Anyway, I only have a vague notion of where you are trying to go with this, so you might as well elaborate. |
