2012 W2 - Box 12

[aaron]

Re: Kill Medical insurance now!

Mine says $22,500... for me and my family. It is quite a sum of money. They will probably tax it before the whole obamacare thing falls apart. That would be about $6 thousand dollars in taxes = what it cost me to insure my family privately 10 years ago, without a substantial deductible like now. It is insane.

[Polish_Silver]

401k vs pension

But since they sold a majority of people the lie that 401(k)s are better than pensions (mostly by violating the ex post facto clause of the constitution in every labor contract in existence by using the loophole claiming bankruptcy repeatedly and with a frequency that no mere mortal could legally do), this could sell too.

-Dcarrig

One of the problems with traditional pensions was that the company did not hold up it's end. Companies went bankrupt because they lost to competition, or to avoid debt repayment as you said. A "defined benefit" plan could only be based on UST bonds, which are vulnerable to inflation.

The better pensions were held in fiduciary accounts, and were independent of the companies survival.
Having the pension money in the title of the individual is better than having it under control of a corporate pension bureaucracy.

The real problem with 401k is that people are not good at managing money, and don't save enough. The only solution I see is a mandatory savings rate, and for a significant portion of the assets to be invested in some sort of global index fund. Not very cheerful, but it's the only way I've seen to get around the two problems of lack of discipline and lack of financial savvy. And there's still the problem of those who live longer than expected.