Social Security

On Tuesday, President Bush had the most bizarre cabinet meeting any president is ever going to have. It was a meeting with an actual cabinet. A filing cabinet. A filing cabinet in Parkersburg, W. Va., to be precise. Strange? Yes. But then again this is a very...

In a romantic mood, I was reading "Anna Karenina" flying down here and stumbled across one of Tolstoy's brilliant insights. At a party at the home of his friend Prince Oblonsky, Konstantin Levin, the philosophical farmer, muses about the futility of dinnertable...

Last April, I had the opportunity to sit across a table from President Bush and discuss his plans for the economy. I asked him what his most important policy priorities were, and he gave me a refreshingly simple and direct answer: "In the first term we're going to cut...

401(k) retirement plans -- those marvelous engines of empowered financial liberation, in which an employee decides how much to contribute toward his own tax-advantaged retirement account, and directs the account's investment himself -- have come under heavy attack...

"By creating private accounts, you'd create private assets and private assets could be passed onto another generation as capital. And I think that would change the lives of millions of people," says Wade Dokken. And Wade would know. A former advisor to Hillary...

Today I'm going to revisit a theme that I believe is the most important of all -- the revolution in the empowerment of the individual investor to make his own decisions and take his own risks. It's critical that we look at this now, because with the recent volatility...

Everyone with an axe to grind is using the example of Enron to grind free markets. And Paul Krugman is doing no less in a December 4, 2001, New York Times op-ed, "A Defining Issue." Krugman is using Enron to demonstrate the terrible dangers of "defined contribution"...

The battle over restructuring America's Social Security system into individual, privately managed accounts is heating up again. So the winds of change keep blowing, foreshadowing what may be the most profound economic transformation since the Reagan tax cuts of the...

Aren't most people too unsophisticated to manage their private account? This is a valid concern, but there are simple solutions that have worked well over twenty years with 401(k) plans, and they could easily be applied here. First, rudimentary investment education...

In my commentaries this week, I've discussed the transcendent importance to the economy and the markets of the potential for restructuring Social Security, to include individually managed private accounts. I've talked about some of the myths about Social Security, and...

This week I'm focusing on the myths that will keep investors from grasping the risks and opportunities on the road ahead as President George W. Bush pushes for restructuring Social Security -- probably with the introduction of private accounts that could be invested...

We may be on the brink of a once-in-a-decade investment opportunity, a rare chance to catch a huge environmental change in the economy and the markets. And it's still early on this one -- you can still catch this one before it becomes part of the conventional wisdom,...