January 28, 2007

A Contrarian View: Save Less, Retire With Enough - New York Times

A Contrarian View: Save Less, Retire With Enough - New York Times

An interesting contrarian approach to saving and investing for retirement makes for popular reading, but seems more designed to sell one of the proponent's software products.

The analysis, necessarily limited to the individual's situation because of limits to the length of the column, ignores the larger issues that have broader implications, e.g., the inevitability that Social Security is destined to change, probably to reduced benefits, if it is to continue viably. Also ignored is the huge benefit to the economy when the combined private personal savings of millions of people are available for corporate investment. More private investment capital is better than less to sustain health.

While appealing, saving less is an invitation to higher risk for individuals and could result in increased consumer debt during the earning years.


As an aside...

I continue to favor privatizing part of Social Security because the part that's privatized is not part of the Government's spending and debt base, overall a good thing for our capitalist (relatively) free market economy [Read Ben Stein's insightful opinion piece! about capitalism]

We should always be wary of any program or strategy that increases reliance on the Government for the financial welfare of a very large proportion of its people, unless you believe that the Government's fundamental role is to redistribute income and transfer wealth among its citizens. (I don't, obviously.)

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