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Ron Paul is well worth reading... I'd like to see him run for Prez.
* Federal spending has grown twice as fast under Bush than Clinton, averaging 6 and 7% increases compared to the 3 and 4% increases of the 1990s.
Bush has never been known for his ability to manage money... that happens when you are never held accountable.
from Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks to Mount Rushmore
LOL... yeah right.
bingo!
Yeah! Congratulations!!!
and the screen name as well...
i think commie pinko stuff is hilarious!!! ROFL!
Nowhere to Call Home
<< six months is not nearly enough... a friend of mine had her house catch on fire... it took over a year to fix everything so she could move back in >>
Published: February 13, 2006
The worst natural disaster in modern United States history has turned into our collective national shame. When the most powerful nation on earth cannot find long-term housing for its own hurricane victims in almost six months, there is no other word to describe it.
Last Tuesday the government stopped paying for about 4,500 hotel rooms for storm evacuees. By March 1, all but a few people with extenuating circumstances will have to leave their hotels. So will those staying aboard cruise ships, many of whom are the police officers, firefighters and other government employees keeping the city from dying once and for all.
Phasing out these stopgap accommodations is not, in itself, a problem. The problem is that many of the families being ejected have no homes to which they can return. The Federal Emergency Management Agency's answer was to provide trailers. It was a poor solution given that the emergency trailer parks tend to concentrate misery, but still better than nothing. Yet, as Jennifer Steinhauer and Eric Lipton reported in The Times last week, of the 21,000 trailers requested for New Orleans, only about 3,000 have been placed, set up and occupied. And the problem is larger than just New Orleans. Several other parishes are waiting for more than half of their trailers. FEMA says that it has the trailers ready to go, but that local governments won't approve sites and utility companies won't provide services.
Struck once by an unforgiving hurricane, the victims now face a perfect storm of poor response: a federal government of terrible administrators and a locality that is legendary for political dysfunction. The federal government's inept handling of the aftermath mirrors its inept handling of the rescue and relief operations. And watching the outbreaks of pettiness among lawmakers in the Louisiana Legislature is enough to turn one's stomach.
What is needed is work that solves the immediate problem and also contributes to the long-term solution. That means rehabilitating existing housing. FEMA is working on a pilot program to refurbish a 325-unit apartment complex. The agency says that the mayor's office has identified 20,000 apartments that could potentially be rehabilitated. Federal, state and local resources should be brought to bear in getting those homes fixed and reoccupied. Not next year, but right now. The same goes for the trailers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/13/opinion/13mon2.html?th&emc=th
so true.
Republicans' Report on Katrina Assails Administration Response
<< common welfare ... interesting wording, so many on this board seem to think that shouldn't be a concern of our government >>
By ERIC LIPTON
Published: February 13, 2006
WASHINGTON, Feb. 12 — House Republicans plan to issue a blistering report on Wednesday that says the Bush administration delayed the evacuation of thousands of New Orleans residents by failing to act quickly on early reports that the levees had broken during Hurricane Katrina.
(February 13, 2006) A draft of the report, to be issued by an 11-member, all-Republican committee, says the Bush administration was informed on the day Hurricane Katrina hit that the levees had been breached, even though the president and other top administration officials earlier said that they had learned of the breach the next day.
That delay was significant, the report says, rejecting the defense given by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security that the time it took to recognize the breach did not significantly affect the response.
"If the levees breached and flooded a large portion of the city, then the flooded city would have to be completely evacuated," the draft report says. "Any delay in confirming the breaches would result in a delay in the post-landfall evacuation of the city." It adds that the White House itself discounted damage reports that later proved true.
The report, by the select House committee examining the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, is the first of three major investigations into the subject; the others, for which reports are expected within one or two months, are being conducted by a Senate committee and by the White House.
The House report blames all levels of government, from the White House to Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana to Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans, for the delayed response to the storm.
"Our investigation revealed that Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare," the draft says. "At every level — individual, corporate, philanthropic and governmental — we failed to meet the challenge that was Katrina. In this cautionary tale, all the little pigs built houses of straw."
A White House spokesman said that President Bush was now focused on the future, not the past. A Department of Homeland Security spokesman said that Michael D. Brown, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was partly to blame for failing to make timely reports to his superiors.
The response to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, in which about 1,400 people died along the Gulf Coast, raises troubling questions about the nation's ability to react to other threats to domestic security, the draft report says.
"If this is what happens when we have advance warning, we shudder to imagine the consequences when we do not," the draft says, referring to the potential for a terror attack. "Four and a half years after 9/11, America is still not ready for prime time."
Democrats declined to appoint members to the committee, raising concerns that the group would produce a whitewash, though several House Democrats participated in committee discussions. After the Republican report was prepared, Democrats praised it in a written response for being comprehensive and detailed, though they complained that it did not hold enough individual officials accountable and continued their call for an independent commission.
What is most disturbing about the hurricane response, the draft report says, is that the entire catastrophe was so easily foreseen — given the weather reports and the precarious position of New Orleans as a below-sea-level city in a major hurricane zone — yet still the response was so flawed.
"It remains difficult to understand how government could respond so ineffectively to a disaster that was anticipated for years, and for which specific dire warnings had been issued for days," the report says. "This crisis was not only predictable, it was predicted."
The homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, and President Bush's own staff of White House domestic security advisers drew some of the most scathing criticism in the report, some of the contents of which were first reported Sunday in The Washington Post.
Mr. Chertoff, the draft report says, should have moved two days before Hurricane Katrina hit — when the National Weather Service issued dire predictions about the storm — to set up a special interagency leadership team to ensure that emergency supplies and rescue squads would be in place ahead of the storm. His department also should have done more to help evacuate the Gulf Coast, the report says.
Skip to next paragraph
A Closer Look
An examination of documents shines a new light on the government response to Hurricane Katrina.
Many States Are Not Confident in Disaster Plans, Survey Finds (February 13, 2006) The Homeland Security Department, the draft report says, "failed to anticipate the likely consequences of the storm and procure the buses, boats and aircraft that were ultimately necessary to evacuate the flooded city prior to Katrina's landfall."
These critical prestorm mistakes were only compounded, the draft report says, when the department failed another vital challenge: to determine rapidly whether the storm had breached a major levee.
A staff member from the department's Federal Emergency Management Agency who was on the ground in New Orleans learned on Monday morning, Aug. 29, the day the storm hit, that a major section of the 17th Street Canal levee had collapsed. He confirmed that report by Monday evening when he flew over the collapsed levee in a Coast Guard helicopter.
Between 10:30 p.m. and midnight, news of the finding reached Mr. Chertoff's top deputy, the White House and the Homeland Security Operations Center, or H.S.O.C., which is the Washington-based nerve center for domestic incidents.
The House investigators were told by Kenneth Rapuano, the deputy homeland security adviser to President Bush, that the administration did not immediately act on the report because it had other dispatches suggesting that such a breach might not have occurred.
"We weren't going to repair the levees overnight, and search and rescue was already operating in full gear, regardless," Mr. Rapuano told the committee, according to the draft.
But the draft says the failure to act on this report did apparently slow the response.
"Because the H.S.O.C. failed to confirm the levee breaches on Monday," the draft says, the first federal decision to line up buses needed to evacuate the city did not happen until Tuesday, when the federal disaster relief worker in New Orleans "saw the water reaching the Superdome and realized it would become an island."
Allen Abney, a White House spokesman, said President Bush had "full confidence" in his homeland security team and was involved in the storm response from beginning to end.
"The president is less interested in yesterday and more interested with today and tomorrow," Mr. Abney said, "so that we can be better prepared for next time."
The White House declined to provide copies of e-mail messages or other correspondence by senior advisers to the president, limiting the House investigators' ability to understand fully the White House's role in the response, the report says. But with the information the committee collected, it says, it is clear that the president's office is also to blame.
"The White House failed to de-conflict varying damage assessments and discounted information that ultimately proved accurate," the draft says. "The president's Homeland Security team did not effectively substantiate, analyze and act on the information at its disposal."
The draft's plainly worded criticism extends to the administrations of Governor Blanco, a Democrat, and Mayor Nagin of New Orleans.
Mr. Nagin, the report says, waited far too long to issue a mandatory evacuation order. The city and the state also had no reliable system to ensure that people in nursing homes or hospitals, or the estimated 100,000 residents without transportation, could get out of harm's way.
"Failure of complete evacuation resulted in hundreds of deaths and severe suffering for thousands," the draft report says, adding that individuals who remained in the city deserved part of the blame.
The response to Hurricane Katrina, the report says, ultimately was a failure of leaders to take action.
"If 9/11 was a failure of imagination," it says, "then Katrina was a failure of initiative."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/13/politics/13katrina.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&th&emc=th
interesting article. thanks for posting it.
yes, I remember about her... some qualifications... with so many like her and Michael Brown having been apointment to important positions in the Bush administration, there are bound to be more disasters in the making.
again, another example of "The Price of Loyalty"
ask him if Clinton was prez if he'd want him to be able to do the same... maybe that'll get the point across.
<< i have him on ignore >>
it is funny...
but I see Bush as having gone so much further over the line than Nixon.
And... at least more and more Republicans are speaking out against the spying program...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/11/politics/11wilson.html?th&emc=th
sure, if he was the only one who had spoken on this topic, I might consider it... but there has been so many "disgruntled ex-employees" of this administration that have spoken out... starting with Richard Clarke... then Paul ONeill.
But I agree... I wish they had all had the guts to speak out when it was less popular to do so. I'm sure it's especially hard for military, ex military, ex cia, because they are trained to take orders without question.
Ex-FEMA Leader Faults Response by White House
By ERIC LIPTON
Published: February 11, 2006
WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 — Michael D. Brown, the former federal emergency management chief who became a ridiculed symbol of the Bush administration's flawed response to Hurricane Katrina, returned in anger to Capitol Hill on Friday and lashed back at his former superiors.
Mr. Brown said that he told a senior White House official early on of the New Orleans flooding, and that the administration was too focused on terrorism to respond properly to natural disasters.
Testifying before a Senate committee, Mr. Brown said he notified a senior White House official — who he said was probably Joe Hagin, the deputy White House chief of staff, but might have been Andrew H. Card Jr., the chief of staff — on the day the hurricane hit to report that it had turned into his "worst nightmare" and that New Orleans was flooding.
It was the first public identification of any White House official who was said to have directly received reports of extensive flooding on Monday, Aug. 29, the day Hurricane Katrina hit.
In the aftermath of the storm, administration officials said they were caught by surprise when they were told of the levee breach on Tuesday, Aug. 30. Mr. Hagin was the senior staff member with President Bush on the day the hurricane hit, when Mr. Bush was traveling in California.
Mr. Brown's politically charged appearance before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs quickly divided the panel's members by party.
Several Republican senators peppered him with hostile questions and suggested he was trying to deflect the blame from his own failures.
In contrast, Mr. Brown drew a gentle, even warm response from Democrats who said he had unfairly been made a scapegoat by the administration, though last year it was frequently Mr. Brown himself who drew the most fire from Democrats in Washington.
In contrast to low-key statements in the past, Mr. Brown, who resigned under pressure on Sept. 12 as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was aggressively on the defensive, saying he was "sick and tired" of his remarks or e-mail messages being taken out of context or hearing that he lacked the leadership skills for his job.
Mr. Brown said it was "baloney" for Department of Homeland Security officials to claim they did not know of the extent of the flooding until Tuesday, because he and other FEMA officials had notified them the day before.
In response to questioning, Mr. Brown also said he believed he told the White House on Monday that a breach had occurred in the 17th Street Canal levee, passing on observations made by one of his staff members on the ground in New Orleans that day.
"Everything that we had planned about, worried about, that FEMA, frankly, had worried about for 10 years was coming true," Mr. Brown said he told the White House aide.
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said Friday morning while the hearing was under way that the administration already knew the city was being flooded. Regardless of the call from Mr. Brown, there were conflicting reports about whether a levee had been breached, Mr. McClellan said.
"The top priority at that time was on saving lives; it was on search and rescue operations," Mr. McClellan said.
Mr. Brown said that he could not recall if he personally called the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, to relay the account of the levee breach. Even if he had, Mr. Brown said, it would have been a waste of time because FEMA's role within the Homeland Security Department had been subordinated to fighting terror. As a result of that, he said, he was unable to quickly get the kind of action he needed, unless he called the White House staff.
The Bush administration, as a whole, he said, did not seem to care enough about natural disasters and had relegated natural disasters to a "stepchild" of national security.
"It is my belief," Mr. Brown told the senators, that if "we've confirmed that a terrorist has blown up the 17th Street Canal levee, then everybody would have jumped all over that and been trying to do everything they could."
Republicans, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the chairwoman, said Mr. Brown's disdain for the new domestic security structure left the department without crucial information it needed about what was happening in New Orleans. Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, said Mr. Brown was shifting attention away from his own lack of responsiveness to the disaster.
Skip to next paragraph
A Closer Look
An examination of documents shines a new light on the government response to Hurricane Katrina.
Transcript: Senate Hearing on Government's Response to Hurricane Katrina (February 10, 2006)
The Inquiry: White House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm (February 10, 2006) "You're not prepared to kind of put a mirror in front of your face and recognize your own inadequacies and say, 'You know something, I made some big mistakes. I wasn't focused. I didn't get things done,' " Mr. Coleman said.
The remark provoked Mr. Brown to raise his voice almost to a shout.
"What do you want me to say?" Mr. Brown said. "I have admitted to mistakes publicly. I've admitted to mistakes in hearings. What more, Senator Coleman, do you want from me?"
Mr. Coleman responded: "A little more candor would suffice."
Democrats, including Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Daniel K. Akaka of Hawaii, said Mr. Brown was being made a scapegoat to deflect criticism from the White House.
"Keep your chin up and fight back," Mr. Lautenberg said.
Several senators, including Democrats, said they were surprised by Mr. Brown's inability to remember crucial details from the early days of the storm, including which White House aide he spoke with and whether Mr. Bush participated in the telephone call.
Mr. Brown also gave differing answers about whether he actually mentioned the levee breach to the White House. At first he said he could not recall whether he used those words but then later he said that he was sure Mr. Hagin or Mr. Card knew it and that he would have told one of them about the breach during the conversation.
He said he could not recall whether he told the White House aide that he needed any particular help — at a time when the city was flooding, thousands were packed into the Superdome without adequate supplies and others were beginning to climb to roofs or attics to avoid drowning.
Two senior Homeland Security Department officials, who testified after Mr. Brown, said that his unwillingness to honor the chain of command and give regular updates to Mr. Chertoff or others in the department severely hampered the department's response.
"We have a president, we have a secretary that are seeing things on television, we're getting reports, what is going on down there?" said Gen. Matthew E. Broderick, who served as the director of the Homeland Security Department's information center in Washington during the storm, recalling his request to FEMA for more information.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/11/politics/11katrina.html?th&emc=th
Ex-C.I.A. Official Says Iraq Data Was Distorted
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 — A C.I.A. veteran who oversaw intelligence assessments about the Middle East from 2000 to 2005 on Friday accused the Bush administration of ignoring or distorting the prewar evidence on a broad range of issues related to Iraq in its effort to justify the American invasion of 2003.
The views of Paul R. Pillar, who retired in October as national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, echoed previous criticism from Democrats and from some administration officials, including Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism adviser, and Paul H. O'Neill, the former treasury secretary.
But Mr. Pillar is the first high-level C.I.A. insider to speak out by name on the use of prewar intelligence. His article for the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs, which charges the administration with the selective use of intelligence about Iraq's unconventional weapons and the chances of postwar chaos in Iraq, was posted Friday on the journal's Web site after it was reported in The Washington Post.
"If the entire body of official intelligence on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war — or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath," Mr. Pillar wrote. "What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in decades."
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Pillar said he recognized that his views would become part of the highly partisan, three-year-old battle over the administration's reasons for going to war. But he said his goal in speaking publicly was to help repair what he called a "broken" relationship between the intelligence produced by the nation's spies and the way it is used by its leaders.
"There is ground to be replowed on Iraq," said Mr. Pillar, now a professor at Georgetown University. "But what is more important is to look at the whole intelligence-policy relationship and get a discussion and debate going to make sure what happened on Iraq doesn't happen again."
President Bush and his aides have denied that the Iraq intelligence was politicized. Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said in November, "Our statements about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein were based on the aggregation of intelligence from a number of sources, and represented the collective view of the intelligence community. Those judgments were shared by Republicans and Democrats alike."
Reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the presidential commission on weapons intelligence headed by Laurence H. Silberman, a senior federal judge, and Charles S. Robb, the former Virginia governor and senator, found that C.I.A. analysts had not been pressed to change their views. A second phase of the Senate committee review, on how administration officials used intelligence, has not been completed.
Mr. Pillar alleged that the earlier studies had considered only "the crudest attempts at politicization" and that the real pressures were far more subtle. "Intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions that had already been made," chiefly to topple Mr. Hussein in order to "shake up the sclerotic power structures of the Middle East," he wrote.
According to Mr. Pillar's account, the administration shaped the answers it got in part by repeatedly asking the same questions, about the threat posed by Iraqi weapons and about ties between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda. When intelligence analysts resisted, he wrote, some of the administration's allies accused Mr. Pillar and others of "trying to sabotage the president's policies."
In light of such accusations, he wrote, analysts began to "sugarcoat" their conclusions.
Mr. Pillar called for a formal declaration by Congress and the White House that intelligence should be clearly separated from policy. He proposed the creation of an independent office, modeled on the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office, to assess the use of intelligence at the request of members of Congress.
Mr. Pillar suggested that the root of the problem might be that top intelligence officials serve at the pleasure of the president.
A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, said the agency had no comment.
Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said that the C.I.A. had long resisted intervention in Iraq, and that internal pressure on analysts to resist war was greater than any external pressure.
"If the C.I.A. had spent less time leaking its opinions, throughout the 1990's, opposed to any conflict with Iraq, and more time developing assets inside Iraq, the agency would have more credibility and better intelligence," said Ms. Pletka, who served for a decade, until 2002, as a Republican staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/11/international/middleeast/11intel.html?ei=5094&en=d010a26f6a334....
ROFL!!!
The Bush administration "used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made,"
this guy isn't the only way attesting to that fact.
it makes me furious. I watched a documentary on Teddy Roosevelt recently.... he must be rolling in his grave.
they chose to be geeks! LOL
so tell me how it feels to make all the perfect choices in life
U.S. Trade Deficit Hits All-Time High
Friday February 10, 11:42 am ET
By Martin Crutsinger, AP Economics Writer
America's Trade Deficit Hits All-Time High of $725.8 Billion in 2005 on Imports of Oil, Food
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. trade deficit soared to an all-time high of $725.8 billion in 2005, pushed upward by record imports of oil, food, cars and other consumer goods. The deficit with China hit an all-time high as did America's deficits with Japan, Europe, OPEC, Canada, Mexico and South and Central America.
The Commerce Department reported Friday that the gap between what America sells abroad and what it imports rose to $725.8 billion last year, up by 17.5 percent from the previous record of $617.6 billion set in 2004.
It marked the fourth consecutive year that America's trade deficit has set a record as American consumers continued their seemingly insatiable demand for all things foreign from new cars to televisions and electronic goods.
The increased foreign competition has helped to keep the lid on prices in this country, but critics say the rising trade deficit is a major factor in the loss of nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs since mid-2000 as U.S. companies moved production overseas to lower-waged nations. Many economists believe those manufacturing jobs will never come back.
"Such a huge trade gap undercuts domestic manufacturing and destroys good U.S. jobs," said Richard Trumka, secretary-treasuer of labor's AFL-CIO. "America's gargantuan trade deficit is a weight around American workers' necks that is pulling them into a cycle of debt, bankruptcy and low-wage service jobs."
Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said the new deficit figure showed that "our trade policy is an unbelievable failure that is selling out American jobs and weakening our economy."
Last year's deficit reflected the fact that imports rose by 12.9 percent to an all-time high of $2 trillion, swamping a 10.4 percent increase in exports, which reached a record high of $1.27 trillion.
For December, the trade deficit edged up a slight 1.5 percent to $65.7 billion, the third highest monthly figure on record.
Bush, in an effort to counter the growing anxiety over America's ability to compete with such rising economic powers as China and India, unveiled a new American Competitiveness Agenda in his State of the Union address to double government spending on basic research, extend tax breaks for company spending on research and hire thousands of new math and science teachers for the nation's high schools.
But critics contend that the trade deficit will keep growing unless the administration takes a harder line against unfair trade practices in low-wage countries such as China, a country they contend has gained a huge advantage over America by artificially depressing the value of its currency, which makes Chinese goods cheaper for American consumers and American products more expensive in China.
The U.S. trade deficit with China rose to a record $201.6 billion last year, the highest deficit ever recorded with any country and 24.5 percent above the previous record of $161.9 billion set in 2004. Part of that increase reflected a 42.6 percent increase in imports of Chinese clothing and textiles, which soared at the beginning of the year after the removal of global quotas.
American manufacturers, arguing that the U.S. textile and clothing industries were losing thousands of jobs, got the administration to negotiate a three-year agreement with China to reimpose quotas in a number of categories.
The United States also recorded record deficits with Japan at $82.7 billion. Until it was surpassed by China in 2000, Japan was the country that had the largest trade gap each year with the United States.
America's trade deficit set records with much of the rest of the world as well. Among those records was a $122.4 billion gap with the 25-nation European Union, a $92.7 billion deficit with the nations that belong to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, a $76.5 billion deficit with Canada and a $50.1 billion deficit with Mexico. Canada and Mexico are America's partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement. The deficit with the countries of South and Central America rose to a record $50.7 billion last year.
A huge 39.4 percent jump in petroleum imports, which rose to $251.6 billion, was a major factor contributing to last year's deficit increase. The price of those imports rose to an all-time high, reflecting tight global supplies. The United States was forced to import more oil in the fall after Hurricane Katrina caused widespread shutdowns of Gulf Coast production.
The rising trade deficits must be financed by increased borrowing from foreigners, who so far have been happy to sell us their products and hold U.S. dollars in payment which they invest in U.S. stock, bonds and other assets. The concern is that at some point foreigners will want to reduce their dollar holdings. If the change occurs at a rapid pace it could send the value of the dollar, U.S. stocks and bond prices all plunging.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060210/economy.html?.v=13
you're right... I'll choose my family and friends... I guess you'd choose Belize.
Now tell me that the 50% of the 72 million BB generation that have almost nothing saved were in the same situation.
I'm sure many have been worse off than myself. I've been lucky in that I had a great career and a very good paying job for many years. One of my good friends has lost almost everything... his wife had MS, he got laid off, she died a year later... his health is poor. He's in his late 40s. He has his house paid for, but is having a hard time making ends meet and when his wife was ill spent most of his 401K.
I'm sure there are some who have just been irresponsible with their finances. Even so, would you have them go without health care? WOuld you put them out on the street when they are 70?
ROFL! good one!
not lately
yeah right... kind of wanted to be around my family, grandkids, etc during retirement... I suppose you think that's a luxury too.
I'll admit I didn't start thinking about retirement until my early 30s. That's when I started saving what I could, which wasn't much (remember raising 5 kids). Then there's college, weddings, etc. Adds up when there is five of them and I feel bad that I haven't been able to offer my kids more. I've been using quicken for more than ten years, balance my check book to the penny every month, and the same for my investment accounts. I plan and organize my finances more than most people I know. That doesn't change the reality about what I've had to work with. My situation has nothing to do with not planning or thinking about retirement. I would love to be able to retire at 65... I'm just not counting on being able to.
and as for financial planners... I had one about 15 years ago... was a waste of time and money.
ah, Bush lied again... surprise surprise
how many 21 year olds have money to save? many are still in school... or paying off school loans... or barely scraping by... saving for a decent car, house, etc. sure the math is good... but reality is different.
Smart people will continue to fund IRAs and 401k plans. Hopefully that money will be there in the end. But there is no guarantee of that either.
many companies have restrictions on what funds you can put your 401K money into... I know mine did. And then there are companies like Enron... definitely no guarantees. But gosh, they made the choice to work for that darn company... sol
I've pretty resigned myself to working til I drop.
and then we're back to... what social security? LOL
his ploy is pretty obvious to everyone... he just looks stupid even trying at this point
I understand what he's saying. My points are:
1) many of us don't have another 35 years
2) saving $240K for retirement isn't going to cut it... let's run just the cost of health care...
retire at 65 live to 85 (20 years)
$500/mo for health coverage (probably alot higher than that)
500 * 20 = 120K
so half of that will just cover health care! but wait... cost of health care rising how much each year? so more than half of that $240K will go towards health care.
not much of a choice
who can retire on $240K even today much less 35 years from now?
it is time for the pendulum to swing the other direction again... and I would hope any decent person would question Rove's tactics regardless of party.
glad you posted this... should be the topic of the day