It’s a 401(k) World | Hacker News Reader

It’s a 401(k) World

nytimes.com

33 pointstocomment25 comments

Debunked quite convincingly there: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/05/01/the-systemi....

(don't stop at the ad-hominem attack on Friedman, though those are fair game, given how much of an hack Friedman is).

Friedman is a hack:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/contest-...

TL;DR - Friedman's been doing minor variations on this "the world is increasingly hyperconnected" bullshit for years and years. It's bad writing and it means nothing.

Several years ago I had the idea of using Markov chain algorithms to auto-generate Thomas Friedman articles. I was going to build a site around it called mechanicalfriedman.com. I just discovered someone else beat me to it:

http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/

There goes my billion dollar exit...

Matt Taibbi practically makes a living writing takedowns of Thomas Friedman's Op/Ed pieces and books. Here's a selection:

http://nypress.com/flathead/ http://nypress.com/flat-n-all-that/

He likes calling bullshit on other writers, and it just so happens Friedman is an endless font of bullshit.

In case you can't get enough of Freidman's mindbogglingly awful articles you can now generate your own!

http://www.thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/

I wish the the "About" page gave the faintest of technical details about its implementation... A couple different Markov chains for varying generic topics, with buzzwords inserted to give the text a shred of focus?

I found it hard to understand the point he was trying to make.

401k has confiscation risk.

Can you elaborate?

I predict the reply will involve how gold is a superior investment vehicle, because the government can't take it from you.

Never mind, of course, that this has happened. Executive Order 6102, I believe it was.

gold is a superior investment vehicle, because the government can't take it from you.

In some countries, pensions were nationalized, the money pooled, and everyone guaranteed a "fair pension" based on social criteria.

It's a risk.

"everyone guaranteed a "fair pension" based on social criteria" Let me translate it into humanspeak for you: this means existing retired, who paid low taxes, will get paid nice pensions out of your high taxes; and when you retire, you'll receive nothing and go begging, since the schema will go bankrupt.

Invest in real estate and skills that let you work for long.

And in USA most real estate is worthless in the long run.

Well at the very least you don't know what the tax rates will be when you begin withdrawals.

You also don't know what the inflation will be before that.

That's the most popular form of savings confiscation.

Meaning that over the long term no large pot of money goes unlooted. The public doesn't have enough influence to stop, say, some form of nationalizing of 401k accounts into pension plans wherein what they are invested in is decided by government employees. Large segments of the public would even go along with it. That then turns into looking like just another tax and entitlement because the funds can be siphoned off and spent immediately, much like social security.

The present status quo regarding finance in the US cannot continue indefinitely. Sooner or later the obligations cannot be met. There are all sorts of failure modes and unpleasant things that can happen along that road, as more funds are sought, or various institutions collapse, and the looters become ever more brazen. Some form of prettified confiscation of 401k accounts isn't anywhere near the worst of them.

> Meaning that over the long term no large pot of money goes unlooted.

Actually, if you look at average fees charged by financial institution, and the divertion of returns on capital to hedge funds and high-frequency traders, 401k funds are already being effectively looted.

> some form of nationalizing of 401k accounts into pension plans wherein what they are invested in is decided by government employees.

Hahhaaahaahaaaaa. That's a good one. But in cae someone else doesn't get the joke and takes you seriously, let me explain the joke. Wall Street already has your 401k money, they don't need to siphon it off via tax cuts for the wealthy like we did with the Social Security surplus.

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