Obama Unveils Measures to Spur Retirement Saving

[steven johnson]

Looks like the Obama Administration is trying to help people build up their nest eggs which were decimated by the economic and stock market downturns.

September 5, 2009
6:04 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama announced new measures on Saturday to encourage Americans to save more money for retirement, a move the White House said would put the economy on a stronger footing in the future.

Obama, in his weekly radio and Internet address, said the government would enact rules making it easier for small businesses to let workers automatically enroll in Individual Retirement Accounts and 401(k) retirement plans.

Payments for unused vacation time and sick leave could be converted into retirement savings under the new measures and Americans would be able to have tax refunds directly deposited into their retirement accounts or used to buy savings bonds.

The measures do not require congressional approval and most will take effect immediately.


Obama Unveils Measures to Spur Retirement Saving

[HughBeaumont]

1. Either the cost of living has to be lowered or wages have to be raised.

Plain und simple.

Also, it's kind of hard to save for a retirement when you DON'T HAVE A JOB TO RETIRE FROM!!!

But hey, what do I know? I'm only talking common sense here. Just ignore me, wealth mongers, and keep going about your stupid assed way of doing things while America turns into one big Northeast Ohio.

[Common Sense Party]

2. How do you lower the cost of living?

[HughBeaumont]

3. That's just the thing. It's never going to be lowered.

Problem is, our wages haven't risen in real dollars since 1979. And when you cannot afford the cost of living because your wages aren't keeping up with it (due to unemployment, devaluation of career due to job offshoring or more often than not just plain stinginess), you go into debt. And it's not a matter of simply "doing without" when "doing without" sometimes means "not eating" or "not having a roof over your head", let alone being able to repair the roof.

It's led to a negative savings rate in less than 30 years time, as the graph in the link shows.

See, this is why Americans are never going to have a future in a set up like this. Unless there's a massive effort to make up for the lost industries (as we should have been doing at least a decade and some change ago instead of fighting wars on Arabic peoples and nouns) and spurn some liveable wage job creation in this country, this problem is only going to get worse and worse. Our educations aren't subsidized and are priced out of the reach of more than a few middle/working/poor families' incomes.

You cannot expect to pay someone that same static 40 thousand a year, no matter how far along time you've progressed, never give them a raise, continually lay people off and expect any kind of savings to happen, let alone assume this person will still be an active participant in a consumer-based economy.

[unlawflcombatnt]

10. Tighten Credit--

So people have less credit-financed spending power, so they can't bid up prices with credit-supplemented buying power. It may not be a pleasant way to go, or even a desirable one, but it is one way to lower the cost of living.

[Kat45]

4. With people struggling to pay their bills, they have no money to save.

Employers don't pay workers a living wage so that they can meet all of their expenses for the necessities of life. Where the heck is the 'extra' money supposed to come from to save for retirement? Gee, remember the times when workers were covered by pensions that gave them defined payments after retirement? And still covered with health care plans from their former employer? When and how did the system revert from companies taking responsibility for those who had labored for them for years to a system where each individual employee is responsible for saving enough money to live on for the rest of his or her life out of wages earned while working? (And many of those who did make a decent wage and save for retirement are finding their savings ravaged by the vagaries of the market and the rip offs perpetrated by Wall Street.)

[ipaint]

5. Frontline tells the story of 401k's.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/retirement/

Your usual scam.

Obama seems to tailor his message to the lightly squeezed upper middle class. Someone needs to tell him that to the majority of the country i.e. the crushed working class and below he is looking increasingly out of touch to put it mildly.

[Deja Q]

8. And being told to get more education to become more "competitive" and getting student loans...

We already are competitive. Most of us, certainly. If wages won't go up then cost of living has to go down. Everyone has to do their part.

[notesdev]

6. Yeah right

This is a prelude to nationalization of private retirement accounts. SS could show a loss in as little as two years, and there is no money to pay for that loss. Treasury would have to borrow more to cover the outlay (since the financial wizards in our government have spent the SS surplus every single year), and in the amounts we are talking, a bond market dislocation would be certain.

[Deja Q]

7. Ken Lay and his friends told Enron employees to invest...

while he and his friends sold the stock.

Even if it's President Obama saying it, we need more to go on (and I don't mean wages or cost of living, which has been said in others' responses).

[unlawflcombatnt]

9. "Automatically" ??

"Automatically" enroll?? That means "automatically" taking additional money out of workers' paychecks without their prior consent. And automatically taking additional workers' money and giving it to IRAs' & 401Ks'--whose main beneficiary is the Wall Street Cosa Nostra. This is just what we DON'T need, with aggregate workers' wages crashing, along with the spending those wages fund.

It's just another plan to enable Wall Street to stick their hands even deeper into the pockets of working Americans, pilfering even more of their money--but this time without even their knowledge or consent. Obama, Bernanke & Geithner are finishing our conversion into the perfect Corporate Welfare state.

[Yupster]

12. This was started by Bush

He added automatic enrollment and default investment choices when he was President.

Now Obama is adding the ability to automatically increase the rate.

Seems like just more of Bush's new policy.

[ixion]

11. holy crap, Obama, small business are dying on the vine right now

they're worried about being able to pay and/or even retain the people they do employ. The LAST THING on their mind right now is a freakin' (market-tied) 401K.

Seriously, the crap that comes out of Washington DC really blows me away sometimes.

Hello? Reality much? :eyes: