Free Republic

David LettermanÂ’s departure isnÂ’t the end of an era. The era of late night talk shows ended a while back. In Johnny CarsonÂ’s final week in the nineties, he played to an audience of twenty million. Lately, Letterman has been lucky to get 2 million. His final shows have played to around 5 million viewers.Late night talk shows still exist, but their intended audience mainly watches viral clips from them the next day. The average age of LettermanÂ’s audience is 54. CBS hopes that the equally smarmy Stephen Colbert will be able to bring his younger audience demo with him,...

The Teamsters have begun informing retirees and current workers that their pension benefits may soon be cut, the final ironic twist to a lobbying campaign that saw the union spend its own members' dollars to win the right to shrink their retirement pay. The somber notifications began going out from the Teamsters Central States Health and Welfare Pension Fund this spring, a decision that could ultimately affect 410,000 current pension participants and a total of more than 10 million U.S. workers nationwide. Cuts could begin as early as next year.

This city’s Spanish name recalls grassy, spring-fed meadows that nourished the first farms here and gave laborers relief from desert heat. Now Las Vegas draws a new generation of settlers epitomized by California transplant Joe Beck: CalPERS pensioners who have made Sin City their No. 1 destination for retirement outside California. Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/the-state-worker/article20702106.html#storylink=cpy

President Obama is rumored to be in talks to move to New York and teach as a professor at Columbia Law School once his time in the White House is over. The president has strong links to Columbia University: He was a transfer student from California’s Occidental College in 1981 as a 20-year-old junior, and graduated from Columbia in 1983. Obama also taught courses in constitutional law at the University of Chicago from 1992 until his election to the US Senate in 2004. He was a senior lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per...

Is Jonathan Gruber — the MIT economist who seemingly dropped out of public view after he was caught on camera bragging about how he and other Obamacare architects misled the American public — now advising the Department of Labor? No evidence indicates that he is, but the authors of DOL’s sweeping new seven-part group of regulations that would sharply curtail choices of assets and investment strategies in 401(k)s, IRAs, and other savings plans appear to share Gruber’s mindset on the “stupidity of the American voter” (a revelation that Rich Lowry aptly described as “an unvarnished look into the progressive mind,...

Got $1 million in your 401(k)? Some savers might be surprised how feasible that savings goal is if they put their mind — and their money — to it. Of course, if you don’t have $1 million saved, you’re definitely not alone. Just 0.42 percent of all 401(k) participants in the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s database had $1 million or more in their account at the end of 2013. EBRI’s data covers 26.4 million savers. Similarly, just a tad more than 72,000 retirement savers, or 0.56 percent of the 13 million plan participants in its database, had $1 million or...

Communism has gone global Many Americans have asked me where they could retire away from this country’s advancement towards Marxism. I was wracking my brain trying to find a place that would be suitable for my retirement years where I could continue to live in the relative freedom I found in the 1970s America. As long as we follow the law, we have nothing to hide and nothing to fear except the arm of “environmental justice” and “social justice.” After all, who wants to live their formative youth years under the Iron Curtain of communism and then their retirement years...

President Obama said Monday he supports the recommendations of a military commission that would reduce the size of traditional military retirement pay by about 20 percent and offer a new defined-contribution benefit for troops who leave before 20 years of service. In a letter to congressional leaders, Mr. Obama said the proposals are “an important step forward in protecting the long-term viability of the all-volunteer force, improving quality-of-life for service members and their families, and ensuring the fiscal sustainability of the military compensation and retirement systems.” Mr. Obama said he has directed his advisers to refine some recommendations, and that...

You’d never know it from the mainstream media puff pieces of Harry Reid’s sudden retirement, but it was a long string of corruption scandals—including a recent one involving his attorney son—that drove the veteran Nevada senator to abruptly leave public office. For nearly a decade Judicial Watch has investigated and exposed Reid’s involvement in a multitude of transgressions and JW even warned the Senate Ethics Committee, but not surprisingly, no action was ever taken. On multiple occasions the Senate minority leader appeared on JW’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” list for his role in a number of political scandals that...

It’s pretty obvious from the photographs that somebody beat the bejesus out of the soon-to-be-former senator from Nevada. And yet the national media has uncritically swallowed the cover story that “exercise equipment” was to blame for the loss of sight in the former majority leader’s right eye. Baloney. As far as I can tell, the piece of equipment allegedly behind the beatdown of Sen. Pat Geary has not been identified, but I can tell you from experience if the senator was using, say, a Soloflex machine this would be impossible: the weight straps simply come apart without any snapping...

Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who suffered a serious eye injury while exercising in his home in January, announced what a lot of conservatives have been waiting with bated breath to hear: He’s not seeking reelection. He’s served for about three decades in Congress and has been one of President Obama’s biggest defenders on several of the White House leader’s key agenda pushes. “I understand this place,” he said, the New York Times reported. “I have quite a bit of power as minority leader.”

Sneed exclusive . . . New York is where they’d rather be. So let’s cut to the chase. Sneed is told by impeccable sources that President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, want to live in New York when they leave the White House. “They want New York, plain and simple,” said a top Sneed source who asked to remain anonymous — but has a relationship with the Obamas. “It’s not an unusual decision,” added the source. “The Clintons moved to New York after Bill Clinton left the presidency. It’s a happening place.” “They love the vibe in New York...

A new federal study says many workers in employer-funded pension plans that fail could see their benefits reduced under the current system of government support. The study was released Wednesday by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp., the federal agency that insures pensions for about 41 million Americans. It found that about half of employers in so-called multi-employer pension plans that fail in the near future will receive reduced payouts. …

You probably want to retire at some point. But before you can get there, you have to be able to answer a few questions.For example, how much money should you have already saved up if you want to retire by age 65?JPMorgan Asset Management's 2015 "Guide to Retirement" has a handy retirement savings checkpoint guide to help you with that one.To get a crude idea of how much you should have saved, find the age nearest to your age and then go across to the column with the salary nearest to your current salary. Then multiply the number you land...

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), who has served in Congress longer than any woman in history, will announce at a news conference Monday that she is retiring from the Senate after five terms in office, three people familiar with her plans said. Mikulski, 78, was the first woman to chair the powerful Appropriations Committe, a post she had to give up this year when the Democrats lost control of the Senate. A social worker turned politician, she has been a forceful presence on many pieces of legislation, passionately liberal on certain issues but also committed to working closely with Republicans.

Under the false pretense of calling for new and tougher so-called fiduciary standards for financial brokers, advisers and retirement plan representatives, the White House once again horned in on Wall Street’s compensation formulas. However, what the president surely knows is that a vast majority of retirement plans — IRAs and 401(k)s — are in simple fee-based products like mutual funds. The commission-based accounts are for those who prefer to direct their brokers in certain purchases inside some of their retirement products. The key to the White House’s interference is in its nuanced language. Currently, a broker may make a recommendation...

Marlene Nelson loved teaching, but after 35 years she was ready to retire the first chance she got. When she became eligible for her pension at age 55 because of an early-retirement incentive known as the Rule of 90, she and her husband sold their home in Glenwood, Minn., and moved someplace warm. "I really would've liked to have taught a little longer, but I just wanted to go out liking my job," Nelson said. She and her husband have spent the past four years living modestly off their two pensions in Arizona. This kind of Utopian early retirement is...

On Feb. 2, 2015, on the heels of the State of the Union Address, the Obama Administration released its budget proposal for the 2016 fiscal year, accompanied by the Treasury Department's General Explanation of the Administration's Fiscal Year 2016 Revenue Proposals (colloquially known as the Greenbook).[1] Given the percentage of his previous proposals that have been passed and the newly-elected Republican majority in both houses of Congress, the vast majority of the proposals in the Greenbook are unlikely to become law during President Obama's last two years in office. However, they are worth noting, as they identify the focus points...

Many Americans appear to be giving up on retirement. Just over one-quarter (26%) of Americans have a traditional notion of retirement in which they plan to stop working altogether when they reach retirement age, according to a new survey of 7,000 households — “Americans’ Financial Security: Perception and Reality” — released Thursday by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Asked about their retirement plans, 21% said they are never planning to retire, while 53% anticipate doing something else, including working at a different job. Roughly 10,000 baby boomers reach retirement every day, so it’s not unexpected that so many of them are...

Government’s involvement in healthcare has been such a rousing success, Obama is now thinking about getting more involved in regulating the retirement of Middle Class America. Hooray… Proposing new executive regulatory rules (because going through Congress is too cumbersome and democratic), the President has claimed that he is riding to the rescue of average American investors with the heavy hand of government oversight. According to theState.com:The proposed rule, which Obama can put in place without congressional approval, would impose a requirement on some financial advisers to act as what the law calls “fiduciaries” for their clients, meaning that when they recommend...