🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2399@shaman.wv.tek.com> andrew@frip.wv.tek.com writes:
>[]
>
>	'It seems to me that $1 invested in private industry will
>	improve the economy more than $1 invested in the government.
>	When I retire in the year 2025, I'd like to be able to say:
>	"because of my social security dollars, US industry is large
>	and profitable"'
>
>A private pension fund manager is required to manage the fund so as to
>preserve the pension, and is not allowed to put social engineering
>objectives over this fiduciary objective.  

...

>In fact, there really is no suitable vehicle in which to invest all
>this money.  But that's not likely to be a problem under the present
>federal policy.

The only suitable thing to do is to invest the money so that we are a
wealthy country when we retire.  After all, the value of the fund is
dependent upon the strength of whatever it is invested in.  

Here's what I was trying to say in my statement.
Our retirement depends upon having a good economy when we
retire.  We should invest in a manner that will give us a surplus of food,
a surplus of housing, cheap health care, factories that crank out
products at little cost, etc, etc..  This is the invest in private
industry scenario.  The alternative is to have a large government,
large social programs, etc..  This won't get us very far if the economy
isn't booming.  A few government programs do invest in the future:
meals for kids, education, infastructure spending.  I'm not against putting
retirement dollars into those.

With the low population growth rate we now have, the number of workers per 
retired person in the year 2025 will be much lower than now.  We need to invest
the retirement money in such a way that will make those future workers produce
more goods than they can now for the same amount of effort.  (Extreme example:
If in the future we can crank out a heart-bypass operation for the price of a 
sack of potatoes, then there will be no problem funding heart-bypass 
operations.)

--Bob