levin70

Social Security: Time to Uncap FICA

Hey Brad

How about this. Reduce benefits before increasing taxes. People didn't pay enough for their benefits so reduce them. None of this would have been a problem if the system would have been defined as a "defined contribution" system instead of using a "defined benefit".

And there is no reason to tax people who don't get the benefits to pay for people who did not earn their benefits. We have plenty of that already.

Or how about this - make it voluntary. If you want higher taxes to pay for benefits other people didn't earn, please give the treasury your money. I however would prefer to keep that which I earn.

Regards

The Bubble of Uncertainty Is About to Burst

Jason

Why are you still allowed to post? So you can destroy more people's capital? Let me see - last big call was BAC going to $20 when it was about 300% higher than it is today. Oh yeah, that was really auspicious.

Please do us all a favor and stop making any type of predictions. All you have accomplished in the past year is to destroy peoples weath. That is not the purpose of these forums

Stop Trying to Jump-Start the Consumer - Barron's Interview

"What has to happen for things to return to normal, he says, is a deleveraging of consumer debt and an increase in savings. Consumer debt is currently 130% of (annual) income - up from 100% in 2000 and 80-90% before that. "It has to come down" in order to repair the consumer's balance sheet. The savings rate used to be 10-12% of income. Now it's 3%. These two factors will reduce consumer spending by $2.5T over the coming years - and "no government-stimulus program is going to offset that effectively."

You know the Fed (can't remember which branch) did a study in 2004/2005 in which it looked at historical savings rates dating back to WW2 (or shortly thereafter). You know what they found that was interesting? They found that the savings rate had changed little for the bottom 80% of wage earners in that time period, even though the national rate had declined from 12% to essentially zero. Thus from inference, we can say that the savings rate went way below zero for the top 20% of wage earners.

So what can we take away from this? I don't know, but maybe we should give out those wall street bonuses :) - but only if they plan on spending it?

Regards

Predictions for the Coming 'Flation'

No one will know when this shift will take place, excluding possibly the heads of all of the large banks.

I tend to disagree. Right now, all that cash given to banks is sitting at the FED. All you need to do is read the stat releases provided by the FED to figure that out. When you see the 700 billion in excess of required reserves start to drop, then you will know that the velocity of money will start increasing.

If nothing is done to drain the liquidity after this fact then that is probably a pretty good indication to start hiding in inflation fighting assets.

Just my two cents

Kind Regards