Free Republic

Social Security turns 80 on Friday, and the massive retirement and disability program is showing its age. Social Security's disability fund is projected to run dry next year. The retirement fund has enough money to pay full benefits until 2035. But once the fund is depleted, the shortfalls are projected to be enormous. The stakes are huge: Nearly 60 million retirees, disabled workers, spouses and children get monthly Social Security payments, and that number is projected to grow to 90 million over the next two decades. And the timing is bad: Social Security faces these problems as fewer employers are...

What do you do when you want something more and different than you’re getting in your home country? For an increasing number of 60+ women, the answer is to move overseas. According to the data we collected through our website, Best Places in the World to Retire, there can be a better life out there, if you are willing to uproot and reinvent yourself as an expat in Belize, Nicaragua or Panama. In addition to the over 5,000 answers and 200 stories on our website, in early July, we released Expats: Expectations & Reality, the first in a series of...

If you haven't taken it upon yourself to start saving for retirement, you could already be in trouble. Even worse, you could be part of a national crisis that's brewing under everyone's radars. In an earnings call Thursday, Blackstone president and COO Tony James articulated the problem and its origins. "I have the view that the hidden crisis in America that no one is talking about is what's going to happen with all of these 20, 30, 40-year-olds who no longer have corporate pension funds of defined benefit," he said. "So, they have got 401(k)s and they are making little...

We shouldn't wonder why people are working into their 70s--we should wonder why anyone retires, assuming they'll still be receiving their full pension in five years.You may have seen a variation of this chart of employment in the U.S. by age group. This chart--courtesy of mdbriefing.com-- shows the number of those employed (with any kind of job--full-time, part-time, self-employed) as a percentage of the Civilian Noninstitutional Population (CNP), which includes everyone 16 years of age and older who is not institutionalized or on active duty in the Armed Forces. A number of striking features pop out of this chart: 1....

Assuming "growth" will fund all promised pensions and entitlements is magical thinking.The core problem with pension plans is that the promises were issued without regard for the revenues needed to pay the promises. Lulled by 60 years of global growth since 1945, those in charge of entitlements and publicly funded pensions assumed that "growth"--of GDP, tax revenues, employment and everything else--would always rise faster than the costs of the promised pensions and entitlements.But due to demographics and a structurally stagnant economy, entitlements and pension costs are rising at a much faster rate than the revenues needed to pay the promised...

Brett Favre, wearing his old Green Bay Packers No. 4 jersey, is featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated this week as part of the magazine's "Where are They Now" issue. Favre voices many of the same thoughts he did back in October when Journal Sentinel reporter Tyler Dunne visited him at his home in Mississippi, talking about his life today, the physical toll the game took on him, his reconciliation with the Packers after the messy departure in 2008, and more. He also thinks he could still play in the NFL – sort of. "I think I could play,"...

Days spent in the hospital as an outpatient, rather than being officially admitted, can leave Medicare patients with bigger bills. It's bad enough spending three or more days in a hospital -- undergoing a barrage of medical tests and procedures. Brace yourself for even more pain at discharge if the hospital tells you that you were actually never admitted but were on Medicare "observation status." That designation could cost you big time. Hospitalized Medicare beneficiaries who are under observation are considered outpatients, even if they spend many days in the hospital. If you find yourself in this boat, there's a...

I’m not sure retirement is a good thing. Not the way it’s done now. The way it’s done now, it seems to me that we’re marginalizing our most skilled workers, fostering idlers and turning old age into a near useless stage of life. It used to be that people didn’t retire. They worked til they died. And if they couldn’t work, hopefully their family or their church took care of them. But everyone who was physically and mentally able to do some useful task did so. The difficulty arose when people became what used to be called senile, or when...

Only 63 percent of Americans have saved any money for retirement within the past year, according to a Federal Reserve survey released Wednesday.The survey of 5,800 Americans, conducted last fall, found that 31 percent of Americans have no retirement savings or pension plans. And among adults older than 45, almost 25 percent of respondents didn't have retirement savings. Thirty-eight percent of respondents, meanwhile, said they don't plan on retiring and will "keep working as long as possible," USA Today reports.

The United States government could start seizing 401(k) plans, says one economist who believes a recent Supreme Court ruling sets the stage for Washington to initiate any such plans. Economist Martin Armstrong published a blog post Monday that took a look at the recent Tibble v. Edison case. The court concluded that employers have an obligation to protect their workers’ 401(k) plans from mutual funds that provide deplorable returns. Armstrong thinks this could give the federal government the arsenal to begin seizing private funds and take companies to court if mutual funds perform poorly. This comes as the Obama administration...

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...