Thursday letters
Banking laws and laughter in today’s letters to the editor.
Pick of the Day: Working years should see you through retirement
A report released by the Employee Benefit Institute this week revealed that 57 percent of workers surveyed in the U.S. have less than $25,000 in savings and investments excluding their residence. The survey also indicated that 28 percent of our citizens feel they will not have enough money to retire.
Workers must plan their own retirement by calibrating five critical elements: years of work, contributions to retirement plan(s), percentage of return on investments, health and years of life. The math simply does not allow an employer (government or business) to pay a worker for 25 years of work followed by payment of retirement benefits for 35 or 40 years.
Here is an important maxim for all U.S. (and world) citizens to understand: A worker must produce for the employer, in government or business, value equal to what is earned in pay and received in benefits while employed and during the entire course of retirement to maintain a balanced economy.
When money is taken from an employed worker to pay a person who is no longer creating value, the system becomes a Ponzi scheme and is doomed to fail.
DICK BAYNTON
CLOVERDALE
March 21, 2013 - 6:09 AM
What Mr. Baynton says is false. There are plenty of people who either haven’t had to work because they’ve inherited great wealthy or have accumulated great wealth while young (think Facebook) and never had to work or never have to work again.
If capitalism were a balanced system as Mr. Baynton would like and seems to think it is, this situation could not occur. The fact that it does occur demonstrates the falsity of his premise.
If his concern is how to ensure retirees have enough goods and services to live comfortably then we will probably need to get a better and deeper understanding of what an economy is, get rid of absentee ownership and be willing to share the wealth more.
A possibly place to begin our understanding is looking at Modern Monetary Theory.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/03/what-is-modern-monetary-theory-or-mmt.html