Which candidate has your best interests at heart?
Living here on Retirement Island, I see a lot of people who are retired, or about to be retired, and are dependent on Social Security, Medicare, their Pension Plans, and their Savings, which are usually in Mutual Funds.
Eventually, all of us will be in the situation of these retirees. And you have to ask yourself, when you are old and dependent on these few sources of income, which candidate is really out to protect your interests, and which candidate is out to protect the interests of people who really don't need protecting?
Consider this:
- One candidate promises, if elected, to cut Social Security for those under 55 and to replace Medicare with "vouchers". Is this in your best interest?
- One candidate made a career in the private sector by buying failing companies, bundling them up and selling them as IPOs to your mutual fund managers. These companies went bankrupt a year or two later, decreasing the value of your savings. Was that in your best interest?
- Those same IPOs, when they went bankrupt, stripped the pensions of the workers and sent them to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation - a taxpayer funded entity - where the pensioners got 40 cents on the dollar and you, the taxpayer got stuck with the bill. Was that in your best interest?
- When GM teetered on bankruptcy, one candidate said "Let it go bankrupt" so that the interests of the bondholders would be preserved, but the employee's pension plans would be stripped. His only criticism, even today, of the bailout was that it preserved the pensions of working-class people, over the interests of bondholders. Is that in your best interest?
- One candidate says we should further deregulate Wall Street so that people can play games with your 401(k), IRA, or investments. Does this strike you as something in your best interest?
- One candidate says we should cut taxes on the wealthiest people in the United States, and that by doing so, the benefits would "trickle down" to you. Does this strike you as something in your best interest?
If you are an average middle-class American, who has worked hard all their lives and hopes to retire someday, making plans based on their Retirement Savings, Pension, Social Security, and Medicare, you really should think long and hard about this. Without these things, you have nothing, really.
One candidate has made a wildly profitable career out of strip-mining the wealth from the middle-class, and has made bold plans to continue to do this on a national scale. If you are retired and voting for this candidate, you really need to think about where this is going.
And that's my final word on the matter.
