Mr. Ryan, I Did Take Responsibility!

Paul Ryan seems to think the 47 percent of us relying on government assistance like unemployment, SS, Medicare, Medicaid, etc., didn’t even try to take responsibility for our retirement or make a contingency plan for bad economic times. He is young and idealistic. His economic education is gotten from a Russian immigrant who wrote science fiction that was so lame it wasn’t even published until the 1950s and who believed in the “virtue of selfishness”. Objectivism was her philosophical contribution that she dumped in our laps based on her disappointment with the Russian socialist system in which she lived. Yet she cashed each and every Social Security check she received from our US government.

Is Paul Ryan aware that only 21 percent of companies in the US provided retirement plans for their employees in 2012 and 92 percent offer a 401(k) plan that is usually invested for the employee in the stock market or in company stock? Only 68% of those companies offering a 401(k) plan provide any matching funds. Without SS and Medicare, seniors are truly on their own at a time when they can least afford it. Will the millenials (those who grew up in the turbulent 2000s) be disciplined enough to budget for their own retirement 35-40 years in advance or will they spend it on luxuries and necessities now? How does that position them for their "golden years"? How will they fare without a social safety net if Mr. Ryan is elected and establishes his own version of the dystopian world of Ayn Rand?

For most of the members of my generation there were 3 legs to our retirement stool on which we could count to see us through the retirement years: investing in a home, contributing to a savings account, and social security benefits at age 66. I was born in 1946, the first year of the birth of the Boomer generation. There were no 401(k)’s till 1980, no IRAs till 1986, and no retirement was offered to most of us who worked for someone else. In 1980 when 401(k)’s were introduced not all companies jumped on the bandwagon to offer them to their employees. The first time I had the opportunity to invest in a 401(k) was in 1992. There was a maximum contribution at that time of 15% based on my salary that eventually increased to 20% in the late 1990s. These contributions were tax deferred and depended on mutual funds and the stock market for growth. The plans were subject to the volatility of the stock market, and employer and government restrictions. Whenever we took money out of these accounts, we had to pay income tax at the current rate of taxation because taxes on contributions to these accounts had been deferred. Those of us willing to sacrifice and put money in savings accounts, and 401(k)’s saw our nest eggs decimated during the 911 crises and again in 2008 with the real estate crash. Now most of us are relying on our savings and SS since our homes have lost value. What will millenials do to save for their retirements? Everyone grows old. Everyone must plan for it. But not everyone has enough discretionary cash to save when getting an education and/or raising a family. It's easy to say, do this or do that and plan ahead this way. It's quite another thing to actually put a plan into practice. I followed the recommendations of retirement planners in the 1980s and 1990s and I lost my savings, my home value, and now I am relying on SS and Medicare (which I paid into all my life) to see me through my "golden years". I have made a few wise economic moves and I am stable. I don't want to rely on my children because they should be saving for their own retirement. Right now, the "gold" in my golden years is looking very tarnished and I might have to sell it as scrap to scrape by. I am planning to go back to work as soon as the economy picks up. Maybe next year?