Is somebody drinking the Kool-Aid? Who has any retirement anymore? That long
ago was robbed from the American worker as they are doing with health
insurance now.Sorry, but all that crap I learned in school in "economics"
class was just that...crap.





The profit SOARS. That's a shame because it means your retirement account
SOARS,
your IRA SOARS, your 401k SOARS, etc. We really have to watch that profit
stuff, it's too good for us.

Corporations are groups of people, my IRA, my 401k, my retirement plan,
who
invest our money in corporations in the expectation that they will make
profits.
Profits increase the value of equity [stock shares] and the amount of
money you
can draw on when you retire. If profits are not made then your IRA, 401K,
etc go
bankrupt and you will never retire.

Be careful of that profit stuff. It may be too good for you!

/s/ DD, retired and loves watching my equity increase.

On May 15, 7:35 pm, Dave wrote:
Chuck Harris wrote:
Uncle Peter wrote:

Good God. Another American company gone Pacific Rim.

Not to worry Peter, they are all going as we slide our
way into third worldness.

And all so we can get xyz for a few bucks less at Wally World.

The part that annoys me to no end is when the USA made product
becomes made in China, the price to the consumer stays the
same. The profit soars, but the price doesn't change, or
goes up.

-Chuck

The profit SOARS. That's a shame because it means your retirement account SOARS,
your IRA SOARS, your 401k SOARS, etc. We really have to watch that profit
stuff, it's too good for us.

Actually it is. Like rich foods it can kill us. It is killing us.

Corporations are groups of people, my IRA, my 401k, my retirement plan, who
invest our money in corporations in the expectation that they will make profits.
Profits increase the value of equity [stock shares] and the amount of money you
can draw on when you retire. If profits are not made then your IRA, 401K, etc go
bankrupt and you will never retire.

Be careful of that profit stuff. It may be too good for you!


Hopefully you will die before the house of cards collapses....

I don't say that to be mean: the notion that we can outsource to
China and have it made for nothing while profiting from it forever is
nuts. The Chinese are going to either sell the tech to all comers at
just over cost and disintermediate you, or they will keep the quality
of yore and raise their price to you, disintermediating you.

Like Harry Mudd, you will get tired of hearing the "d" word.

The Chinese do not need our "service' and "knowledge workers" to make
50- or 5- year old technology. In fact they can natively build
microprocessors two generations-i.e. 36 months-behind ours. Our only
advantage on an absolute basis is the leading edge, and in having an
aerospace level supply chain with melt-to-ship traceability.

When they have that, they will dump the dollar and implode your
precious 401K and tech stock holdings. It will ruin them in dollar
terms, BUT THEY DON"T CARE. What are we going to do, repossess their
houses? Ruin their credit ratings? Refuse them future check cashing
services?

It's not as if they are a family living in St. Louis or Seattle who
could be put out on the street. They own their street, their houses,
and have a military to keep it so. The rules of consumer credit do not
apply to sovereign nations with effective militaries.

Some skill. New England Tractor Trailer pumps out drivers by the gross.
Very few earn anywhere's near 1800+ a week.

I have a CDL with all endorsements including hazmat and passenger. I
don't drive a truck for a living as I'm not interested in living in a
sleeper and working 100 hour weeks for about $35k a year net which is
what the average driver for the "Big Five" (Swift, Schneider, Werner,
JB Hunt, and one other which seems to change every year) makes. I'm
too old to work the docks or drive casual long enough to get on with
YellowRoadway or UPS Freight. And as a white male getting on with
Greyhound would be not worth the bother.


SNIPPED

All of your senators have vested retirements (18,000 a month) after serving
one term.
They have vested health care, and most had inherited wealth to begin with.
Do you wonder why they are in the market (they can afford to be, you're
paying the tab) and the rich always get richer at the expense of a
lessening middle class...

SNIPPED

You've been listening to Limbaugh for too many years. Most kids starting out
can barely afford to pay their bills, let alone invest money in a 401K or
IRA.
Most folks don't have 30 years in front of them. Baby boomers never had
401Ks or IRAs when they started off.

I opened this with the following: "Your retirement planning is YOUR
RESPONSIBILITY! It is NOT the responsibility of government. It is NOT the
responsibility of your employer. It is NOT the responsibility of your
union. The responsibility is Yours alone!" It is true!

If the jobs continual to be outsourced, and if the trade deficit continues,
and if
foreign scab labor is allowed to bid against union scale you're going to
find
your savings will have very little buying power when the worth of the dollar
crashes on the world market. Government is the one who is giving away and
borrowing from social security and allowing the raping of this country.

Pete k1zjh

/s/ DD, W1MCE

Well Uncle Peter, we both know that it is impossible to live on Social
[in]Security. That's a given.

Since you are responsible for your retirement, not government nor business, what
do you propose?

The world economy envisioned by Adam Smith and Thomas Paine in the late 1700s is
now here. Business will do whatever is necessary to survive and be profitable in
a very competitive world wide economy. Businesses will succeed and fail.
Government can't stop it! Again I ask, "What do you propose?"

What government must do is make absolute arbitrage of labor
expensive.

Chinese labor is cheap because, in addition to being low skilled, not
speaking English, and not being terribly imbued with a sense of
precision workmanship, it is artificially suppressed by its own
government, for the advantage of its ruling class. Also, there are no
environmental protection, worker safety, product liability or other
such issues it presents or concern it. A company taking designs and
procedures invented here with people trained and educated at American
societal expense and building it over there is simply doing what most
very successful enterprises-from Ford Motor Company to Microsoft to
the Mafia-have done to make huge amounts of money. They have
privatized the profits and commonized the costs of doing business.

There is an extent to which that's a necessary cost for societal
progress, and an extent to which it is nothing more than outright
destruction of the social fabric. What started as "constructive
engagement" of China has reached that point because it makes a few
people-the CEO's of major corporations, certain politicians, and stock
speculators-insanely wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

If you have enough money and enough balls and can speculate in stock
successfully and get out of the market before it finally blows up,
putting your assets in physical commodities such as gold in your
defensible posession, you stand to be one of the Big Winners. But it's
like a casino: if the house didn't have the odds, there would be no
house. We can no more all do this than we can all take our life
savings and go to Vegas and gamble ourselves rich for life. A few can
succeed: most will be bankrupt and the casinos will make a lot of
money. For MOST people the stock market is a casino, no more, and no
less.

On May 17, 9:48 am, "Smokey" wrote:
Is somebody drinking the Kool-Aid? Who has any retirement anymore? That long
ago was robbed from the American worker as they are doing with health
insurance now.Sorry, but all that crap I learned in school in "economics"
class was just that...crap.


I used to have a calendar of naked stewardesses-"Stripped" of their
pension.

A few of them were good looking broads, as Frank would have put it.
(Maybe he did!)

I wish I still had it because it was a good reminder of what
America's corporations mean to do to all of us.

On May 16, 7:53 pm, Chuck Harris wrote:
Scott Dorsey wrote:
Dave wrote:
REDACTED: Waking up is NOT a proposal!! State a credible plan that people can
participate in that will provide credible cash flow in retirement.

I don't have one.
But I do have relatives who lived in countries where they were very rich,
and then the currency became worthless.

Having a guaranteed $5k a month income from a retirement program doesn't do
you much good when it costs $5k for a loaf of bread.
--scott

I think we could go a long ways towards fixing the problem by
doing the following:

1) Close the boarders to illegal immigration.
2) Make it illegal to hire illegal immigrants.
3) Tax American businesses that manufacture abroad as if they
were foreign businesses.
4) Tax software that is done in other countries as if it were
an import of a hard good.
5) Eliminate the H1B Visa program. We have plenty of out-of-work
hitech workers here already that just want to be paid fairly.


Yes, it would, which is why it won't happen.