E-mail to President Obama

Social Security:
Suggestion 1: Put some working people on the Social Security reform committee for “real world input.” On C-Span several days ago, a professor from Harvard and some Congressman were discussing the best Stock Market based 401k retirement option. Their opinions were way off base from a true understanding of the “real world” of working people.
Suggestion 2: Ideas for Reform:
The realization that the entire retirement system in the United States was broken came into the clear focus of national attention with the financial meltdown. Social Security must be transformed into the “main retirement vehicle” that provides adequate income for people in their retirement years. This demands at least three strategies be implemented during working years to accommodate a longer life span during non-working years:
1. Postpone pay-outs to subscribers until they reach age 70.
2. Raise the collection rate during the working years.
3. Remove the income cap for Social Security pay-in.
Social Security should be structured to provide a minimum base retirement income. Also, optional additional retirement income could be set up by indexing an individual’s additional amounts paid in to the amount that person receives. (An optional conservative, indexed stock fund could also be set up.) This provides flexibility for each person to increase their retirement income by paying more in or utilizing an investment option.
An individual 401k should only enhance the standard of living, not be structured as the “main retirement vehicle.” Most clearly, Stock Market based 401k’s are broken too! They are unreliable, unstable, unsafe, ill conceived and illogical. Why? In retirement years, a dependable fixed income is needed. The Stock Market is highly volatile thus highly variable and cannot provide a dependable fixed income. The Stock Market is not a safe haven due to the increasingly volatile and uncertain world in which we live.
Additionally, most people don’t have the time, knowledge, or self-discipline to manage and consistently contribute to a 401k.
Under the present system, an “investment advisor” manages a 401k for the individual. Problems are: 1. The advisor may not actually know anymore than the 401k owner. 2. The advisor is getting paid a commission on his recommendations or what he sells to the 401k owner and objectivity is lost. 3. How much risk does a person want?
Quoting Bernard Baruch:
“If you are ready and able to give up everything else, to study the whole history and background of the market and all the principal companies whose stocks are on the board as carefully as a medical student studies anatomy, to glue your nose at the tape at the opening of every day of the year and never take it off till night, if you can do all that and in addition you have the cool nerves of a great gambler, the sixth sense of a kind of clairvoyant, and the courage of a lion, then you’ve got a chance.”

(From my Blog- www.deadfriendsandme.blogspot.com