Saturday, February 09, 2013

Threads Elsewhere

I'm always struck by the people who are just like "well I had a high paying job and was lucky in life and saved a bunch of money so this is awesome because it's awesome for me."

The point is that ultimately, as a society, we've generally decided that there's a limit to how far we'll let 70-year-olds fall. We set up a system which involved favorable tax treatment for employer-based (and employee contributed to) retirement savings, the idea being that this system, plus social security, would let people retire in relative comfort and with reasonable economic security. We're now seeing the result of that experiment, and it's a failure for most people.

Some lucky winners won! hurrah for them. I'm sure it was all their own doing. They built that!