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.

"I also discovered that a lot of young men are scared shitless -- of women, themselves and their future; that, contrary to our cultural imaginings, they are just as desperate to figure things out as young women."

I wish someone would have pointed that out to the cartoon-stereotype angry lesbians who ran my college in the early 1990's. Imagine my surprise at learning that, at only nineteen years old, I was at the privileged end of a millenia-old power dynamic. Oppressing half the human race, hundreds of years before I was even born--what an accomplishment!

Anyone who is considering voting for McCain instead of Obama...

It's all well and good to say "we won't pull out, we'll stay there as long as we have to." Easy to say.

As the saying goes: You and what army, exactly?

So when McCain gets all manly and squares his creepy little gnome jaw and says "We won't back down" the translation is "We're going to institute a draft in my first term."

Because how else are you going to do it?

"I think an increase of 65,000 by 2010 is out of reach with a volunteer force, unless you have a very significant downturn in the economy."

Depends on what you mean by "volunteer." You can make anyone volunteer for anything if the alternatives are bad enough.

I hate to even mention it because I don't want to give the Current Occupant any ideas, but one of these days someone is going to look at all the college grads with unpayable student loans, and the homeowners who are upside-down on their mortgages, and think, "Hmmm... THERE's someone who could use a helping hand."

Just one little ol' condition... It'll only be for a year.

We pro-o-o-o-mise.