Funny, I was just thinking about this on the way into work today (which, by the way, I do on foot--I don't own a car.)

First off, beware of ANY plan, scheme or system which involves handing over your money now in exchange for some reward in thirty years.

We always hear about the magic of compound interest but the financial boosters are much less vocal about the tragic of inflation. (Yeah, I know, should be "tragedy" but it doesn't rhyme and is therefore less clever.) Once you factor in inflation your savings become much less impressive.

The thing about retirement savings--and I'm talking primarily about private plans here, not Social Security or Canada Pension Plan which are run by governments--the thing about retirements savings is that they require you to swim with sharks. There's just no way around it.

Look: If you consider yourself a "conservative" investor you'll settle for returns that are just a smidge above inflation. Say inflation is running at 4% and your absolutely safe, diversified-across-all-time-and-space retirement fund is averaging five percent. That means you're actually making one percent a year. Now subtract the various fees you are charged (the occasional transaction, fees for not having enough in your account, fees for getting paper statements instead of e-statements, fees for getting e-statements instead of paper statements etc.) and that extra one percent is eaten up right quick.

The financial industry is structured to capture every last penny of "safe" growth. If it wasn't, they would be leaving money on the table. Why would they do that?

At the other end of the scale, when you hear about people looking for "aggressive growth" what they're really going for is a possible return of ten, twenty, thirty percent a year IN EXCHANGE FOR the possibility of losing the same amount or more. The reason the winners will make ten, twenty, thirty percent is because someone else will have made similar bets on different horses and will lose their entire nut.

The stinky little trick we've all played on ourselves is that while it is theoretically possible (even reasonably likely, if you know what you're doing) for ANYONE to average five points over inflation, it is impossible for EVERYONE to do so. The only reason one person gets the plus-five is because someone lost five percent. Now, when Bush and company tried to sell the privatization of Social Security, the selling point was that you personally could make a good return and therefore the whole system can rely on people making that same return.

In practice, of course, the finanical professionals will make the big returns and the average person will lose. Exceptions will be, well, the exception.

Which makes for an admittedly grim picture. But people have to look it in the face because for the past thirty years Republicans and Republican-lites and Conservatives and Conservative-lites have slashed the social safety nets while reassuring us that 1) it will allow someone to get rich, and 2) by implication, that someone will be you.

Now, there's a way to get around it. First it requires us to accept that you cannot have a system where people get fabulously wealthy and where everybody has a decent life and retirement. You just can't. You can have one or the other but not both. You can pretend, you can obfuscate, you can jig the books around and you can bring up voodoo like Laffer Curves and compound-interest magic and the like but the fact is that insane amounts of wealth are being burned up by a small number of people today and because they are being allowed to easily acquire far more than they need, the rest of us will have to go without.

$300/month/SOI times 12 months/year times 80,000 SOIs = 288 million dollars a year.

You know what? If that's what it takes to sort of stabilize Iraq, it would be a real bargain. If that relative stability brought the price of oil down by even five bucks a barrel, the savings to the U.S. economy (using 20 million barrels a day) would pay the annual cost in just under three days.

I suggest the U.S. write a bunch of post dated cheques and consider itself exceedingly lucky to get off so cheap.

Al Gore is the perfect choice. He will remind everyone (well, 49.5% of everyone) of the horrible, horrible mistake they made when they chose the guy you'd like to have a beer with instead of the smart but stuffy guy.

Of course, no one should even have to do this but even now Barack Obama's "elitism" is being allowed to be an issue instead of being laughed off the table.

Whatever one's reason for not using the semicolon, it's not to make manly, Hemingwayesque shorter sentences. The plague of the comma splice is proof, they use it everywhere a semicolon would have been appropriate. (See what I just did there? It makes you want to punch me, doesn't it? And you'd be right to do it.)

So don't suggest that the semicolon is girly. We're already too far along that road to that "Idiocracy" future in which reading (and by extension proper command of one's mother tongue) is for fags.