The purpose of pension-type programs is to ensure that the pension exists at the end with at least a basic rate of return, it is most certainly not an investment vehicle for the vast majority of under- to middle-class workers, only for upper-class workers - and these are precisely the people who are the subject of my comments. To get that insurance requires extensive knowledge and experience, and diversification of portfolios, and access to information that the vast majority of individuals do not have and will never have. In these programs, the choice given to investors is extremely limited (usually to a handful or a few dozen plans) - and that’s the way it should be if the goal is reliability. In fact, I tend to agree that the use of the stock market in even these large pension and retirement plans should be limited or banned, as it can be too risky for the goal of the program - witness all the people who have lost their retirement in the dotcom crash and now again with the housing market - the goal is not maximizing return, it’s ensuring return, and stocks are not the way to go there. They most certainly do NOT do better if they are supposed to retire in a crash part of the cycle. Just because they do better on average than less risky programs does not mean that is the optimal solution - they essentially got lucky. Would most people take a 66% chance to have a million dollar in 30 years, or a 95% chance to have $700,000 in 30 years (as an example)?
That sounds really like a total non-sequitur and hyperbole. As is the comment that a “high class” education being worthless because of affirmative action - it’s 1000% untrue, the top flight school degree is still an advantage in the technical and management fields. You have any other ideas on how to bring African Americans as a whole back up to the White-Asian income level (my guess is you’ve got the tried-and-true “they shouldn’t have any advantages, it’s a meritocracy”)? But that’s for another post.
Which was part of my point - you’ve always got misuse, it must always be watched and prevented, but you don’t hammer the program into oblivion (like US welfare) or do a cheapy implementation because of that, you fix it. The US has very thin retraining programs and they are not universal or widespread.
Taxes go to a million different things! Discretionary spending in the national budget, behind defense, debt servicing, and the few giant programs (social security, medicare, nationally-covered health care, and so on) is a very small percentage - and those programs I list are hardly social experiments of local government.
Trickle down economics has been discredited for 20 years, only the selfish and greedy in US politics still consider it to be effective - it was nonsense during the Reagan years and everyone could see it, but it sure does make rich people richer! Just because they have more money to invest in the stock market, which is supposed to create more and better jobs, is entirely unreal - in bad times the money goes into savings, the very rich always have tax dodges or overseas shelters and programs that get them out of even their already too-low taxes, in good times the money may make it more into stocks and companies, but even then, you have the super-faulty assumption that these days, increasing investment in a company means more ad better jobs - the stock market responds very positively to shipping jobs overseas, cutting of jobs for “efficiency” (real or not), and increases in technology that result in reduction of jobs - this is one of the main reasons the stock market system in the US is so screwed up!