Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Early Retirement Bollocks
by Tom BozzoSteve Jobs Thomas Friedman's idiotic column arguing that darker clouds on the energy front mean that we really must do something about our "runaway entitlements" reminds me of something.
A set of reactions to the NYC transit strike suckered the otherwise mostly sensible Kevin Drum into writing this:
In contrast, only a few years ago it was considered in much the same circles the apotheosis of American achievement to be able to retire as a 25-year-old millionaire after a three-year career of selling Web surfers cat food without regard to how much cat food costs. Sites offering financial planning information certainly don't stigmatize getting out of the rat race with money socked away in one's own name (e.g., here).
So the message is 'labor, keep you noses to the grindstone'; 'capital, party on.'
A set of reactions to the NYC transit strike suckered the otherwise mostly sensible Kevin Drum into writing this:
But retiring at age 55, with 25 years on the job, at half salary? I support unions and I support the notion that Americans work too much, but even so that strikes me as indefensible. After all, most people have working lives of 40-50 years, and it's hard to imagine that they have a lot of sympathy for a deal like that. I have to confess that I don't.In response, Atrios did the blogiverse a substantial service by demonstrating that this sort of retirement benefit has a distinctly finite cost for employers who might offer it (less, for instance, than a decent family health plan obtained in the private market, until you hit upper middle class salaries):
It just isn't that generous a benefit, but we've been programmed to perceive defined benefit plans as a "gift" from companies, when all they're really doing is throwing money into a big investment fund year after year (at least, they're supposed to) and then paying off their employees from it. It doesn't cost employers that much to provide that level of retirement benefits.And, in a follow-up, he noted:
There's almost a social stigma to retiring "early."It's important to remember that the "social" (i.e., mainstream pundit/center-right policy analyst) stigma to "early" retirement is highly selective: It's a Bad Thing for people who work strenuous or repetitive jobs to retire early because in the view of the world's Friedmans, workers must commit to a full lifetime of work even as employers need not (or even should not) commit to their workers except as the imperatives of the Market dictate.
In contrast, only a few years ago it was considered in much the same circles the apotheosis of American achievement to be able to retire as a 25-year-old millionaire after a three-year career of selling Web surfers cat food without regard to how much cat food costs. Sites offering financial planning information certainly don't stigmatize getting out of the rat race with money socked away in one's own name (e.g., here).
So the message is 'labor, keep you noses to the grindstone'; 'capital, party on.'
