Retirement Fail

My retirement lottery ticket collection (my 401k holdings) has been a money sink. Common "investments" their year over year performance has been so bad for the last 15 years that I would have been better buying antique coins and stuffing them in a mattress.

The only thing the get-rich-quick, guarantee-moneymaker-for-hedge-fund-weasels plans have been good for is
a) a leading indicator, by one or two quarters, of the economic outlook for where I live (They literally predicted the dot-bomb crash for me.),
b) getting some paltry matching funds out of my employers (Almost enough to make up for the losses, but not enough to make up for losses plus inflation.)
c) A way to shelter cash from taxes.

The article tells you how much you need to save. I laughed, bitterly. How can you 'save' when your wages are stagnant, but costs keep going up, and you have to pay toward supporting your own mother who lives in a cheap (red) state (cheap as unwilling to spend anything on social or medical services for the poor and elderly.)

The scamming of the people into 401(k)s, and then the demolishment of private pension, and now voter "resentwent" (read jealousy) of public worker pensions (which almost everybody who worked a corporate job used to get) has led to the spectre of the elderly ending up homeless and eating dog food, and dying earlier than neccessary because they are too poor to afford medical care.

IMO, the GOP probably wishes it could put the working class elderly (anyone over 50, by the way they don't hire) out on ice floes to die. They they could not be forced to view them, or court with their votes. Then again, with their voter disenfranchisement efforts (homeless? can't vote, then!) they will soon make the elderly unneccesary to their aspirations of oligarchical rule.

I'm 51. Already they've raised the eligibility for social security for people my age to 67 or 70. By the time I'm going to be ready to retire, they will have moved the goalpost twice more. The only decent thing in the whole mess is the health care thing, which didn't go far enough, and the rethugs are desperate to shitcan that. The whole Ron Paul thing revealed their true face, IMO. The objectivist (and objectionable) Libertarians are just a stalking horse for the GOP "mainstream".

I am really surprised that we haven't had more people go off the deep end, and not just kill themselves, but kill a lot of others. The rethugs have the impoverished elderly blaming "welfare mothers", "immigrants", "liberals", "drug addicts", "the unemployed", "gays", "atheists", "muslim terorists", and everyone else except the rethugs and their 0.1%'er bankster masters who want cheap serfitude.

It angers me that my own sister buys into this crap. Then again, she married the son of a 1%'er.

What will I do when it comes time to retire? Fuck if I know. Probably live poor, and die when the money is gone.

Amen. Hallelujah.