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Boomer Reality: 61…And Still Living In The Basement

87-year-old Lew Manchester has just returned from a 3-week trip touring Buddhist temples in Laos and cruising the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. His 61-year-old daughter Lee lives year-round in the basement of her friend’s Cape Cod cottage, venturing into the winter cold to get to the bathroom. As Bloomberg reports, Lew is making the most of his old age. Lee is paring back and lightening her load as she looks ahead to her later years. Both worked all their lives, both saved what they could. “Timing is everything and my dad’s timing with jobs, real estate and retirement benefits was better,” said Lee. A rising tide of graying baby boomers is less secure financially and has a lower standard of living than their aged parents.

Via Bloomberg,

The median net worth for U.S. households headed by boomers aged 55 to 64 was almost 8 percent lower, at $143,964, than those 75 and older in 2011, according to Census Bureau data. Boomers lost more than other groups in the stock market and housing bust of 2008, and many also lost their jobs in the aftermath at a critical point in their productive years.

…

“Baby boomers are the first generation without the safety net of pensions and other benefits their parents have,” said Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. “They’re facing a much more challenging old age.”

…

Lee said she harbors no resentment for her dad, who she credits with instilling her with a strong work ethic. “I was never allowed to dream,” she said. “My parents and then my husband expected me to work, and I couldn’t really think about what I most wanted to do.”

…

Lee is hardly the only baby boomer who didn’t save enough, worked for companies without 401(k) accounts or lost significant amounts in the financial crisis. Today, her retirement savings of $120,000 are right at the median 401(k) balance for households headed by baby boomers, according to 2011 data from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

That will provide just $4,800 a year to boomers when they turn 65, assuming they take out 4 percent annually, the limit financial planners say should be withdrawn to assure retirees don’t run out of money in their lifetimes.

…

Had boomers like Lee been thriftier, they would have still been hurt by a shift to 401(k) accounts from pensions in the 1980s. Thirty-seven percent of the elderly in the U.S. collect pensions, which provide some guaranteed income until they die. Fewer than 10 percent of boomers collect pensions, and that number is quickly shrinking.

…

“She has never complained to me about not having enough money,” he said. “But if she needs it, I’ll advance it.”

Lee, who has repaid the money she borrowed, avoids dwelling on her difficulties during her weekly calls to her dad.

“I know he’ll help me if I fall off the ledge, but he taught me to be self-sufficient,” she said.

…

“It’s liberating finally getting to a point in my life where I don’t need a lot of stuff,” she said. “I felt like I was getting rid of the baggage of life that I’d kept dragging behind me and which was just weighing me down.”

…

Lee doesn’t regret downsizing her life. She has more time than ever to enjoy the outdoors, read and spend time with her friends.

“There’s so much pressure to keep up, to keep buying things, to stay on the treadmill always hoping to have more,” she said. “Well, less can be better.”

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/c9pfGvWHRmU/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Confusion Continues for Obamacare Health Exchange Rollout

Originally, Obamacare’s deadline to
sign up for health coverage that takes effect in January was
December 15. That date was pushed to December 23. Last week, the
administration also announced that insurers selling policies
through the law’s exchanges would have to accept payment as late as
December 31 for coverage that begins on New Year’s Day.

These delays were generally supposed to ease the transition into
the new insurance regime following the multiple technical and
administrative troubles that have afflicted the rollout of the
exchanges.

But
as USA Today reports, there’s still a fair amount of confusion
about who is signed up and who has paid for coverage through the
federal exchanges:

Some frustrated consumers are sending premium payments to
insurers who have never heard of them. Others say they will pass up
federal subsidies and pay full price through insurers, while still
others have given up altogether on the promise of health insurance
by Jan. 1.

Consternation and confusion over applications sent through the
federal HealthCare.gov website continue into the last seven days
before the Dec. 23 enrollment deadline. Consumers with health
issues are particularly nervous about the prospect of not having
insurance at the start of the new year. Federal assurances last
week about a “special enrollment period” for people whose
applications have been hung up on the site are little comfort as
neither insurers nor consumers have any idea how this will work and
who will qualify.

Meanwhile, we continue to see problems in the state-run
exchanges. Earlier this month, the head of Maryland’s health
insurance exchange
stepped down following a problem-plagued rollout in the state.
The move followed the
resignation of the top exchange official in Hawaii, another
state which has had trouble getting its exchange up and running.
Yesterday, the head of Minnesota’s state-run exchange
also resigned, reports MPR News:

The head of Minnesota’s health insurance marketplace resigned
Tuesday after facing criticism over the troubled rollout and a
questionably timed vacation in Costa Rica.

April Todd-Malmlov submitted her resignation during an emergency
closed session of the government board of MNsure, Minnesota’s
version of the insurance exchange that’s tied to the federal health
care overhaul. She had been under increasing pressure over
insurance sign-up problems and failed to get a vote of confidence
from Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton last week.

No federal officials have yet been fired over the botched
rollout of the federal exchange, which performed even worse than
the vast majority of the states.

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/18/confusion-continues-for-obamacare-health
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Billie Jean King Sent to Tweak Russia’s Homophobia at the Olympics

Battle of the Sex Is Not Something a Country Should Be Losing Its Mind About President Barack Obama and
other top political officials will not be attending the Winter
Olympics in Sochi, Russia. But never fear: While the president
remains locked in a life-and-death battle with the Internet for the
soul of Obamacare, he’s sending a delegation to attend. That it
includes the most famous openly gay athlete in the world is no
doubt just a coincidence. From
USA Today:

The White House delivered a strong message of opposition to
Russia’s anti-gay laws Tuesday with the announcement of its
delegation to the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics.

The White House delegation will include an openly gay athlete:
tennis great Billie Jean King.

It will not include the president, first lady or the vice
president, all who headed the previous four Olympic delegations, or
a cabinet secretary, only a former one. This marks the first
Olympics since the 2000 Sydney Summer Games that a U.S. president,
vice president, first lady or former president has not been a
member of the delegation for the opening ceremony, which will be
Feb. 7 in Sochi.

The delegation will also include openly gay Olympic
medal-winning hockey player Caitlin Cahow:

“It’s obviously a statement that’s being made, but I think it’s
an incredibly respectful one,” Cahow told USA TODAY Sports.
“Basically, the White House is highlighting Americans who know what
it means to have freedoms and liberties under the constitution.
That’s really what we’re representing in Sochi and it’s not at all
different from what’s espoused in the spirit of Olympism.”

The delegation also includes figure skater Brian Boitano, and
that’s where that sentence ends, because apparently talking about
his personal life is
not one of the things Brian Boitano would do.

It’s a fun, in-your-face decision, though it’s not clear if it
will have much of an impact beyond a signaling statement. Since
Russia has decided to blame non-heterosexuals for its cultural
ills, the blowback has arguably gone beyond anything President
Vladimir Putin can control, even if he wanted to. Being openly gay
(or even friendly to gays) has become
increasingly dangerous in the country.

Bonus libertarian video! Something Brian Boitano would
do is help John Stossel illustrate how “spontaneous order”
works:

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/18/billie-jean-king-sent-to-tweak-russias-h
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John Stossel Looks Back on Liberty in 2013

This wasn’t a great year for liberty. A few of the bigger
disasters that government caused were Obamacare, the government
shutdown, and covering up the NSA’s spying on citizens. Obamacare
was supposed to “bend the cost curve” downward. The central
planners had lots of time to perfect their scheme. For a
generation, the brightest left-wing wonks focused on health care
policy. The result? Soviet-style consumer service comes to America.
The real disaster of the government shutdown was the unnecessary
panic over it. Zoos would shut down, and baby pandas would starve.
The media made it sound like America might not survive even
slightly limited government. They were happy to echo the
politicians’ claim that there’s no wasteful or stupid spending to
cut. “The cupboard is bare,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
“There’s no more cuts to make.” Nothing to cut? Government spends
$3.8 trillion a year! John Stossel says that to make next year
better, we must stop trusting such a powerful government to
restrain itself. We should cut back its duties to reduce its
power.

View this article.

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/18/john-stossel-looks-back-on-liberty-in-20
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Poor 5 Year Auction With Huge Tail Sticksaved By Primary Dealers

If Yesterday’s 2 Year auction was strong to quite strong, with a soaring Bid to Cover and a yield stopping through the When Issued, today’s 5 Year auction of $35 billion in 5 Year paper was ugly to very ugly. With a When Issued trading at 1.578% at 1 pm, there appears to have been an air pocket at the time of pricing, which concluded at a high yield of 1.600%, a rather massive 2.2 bps tail, and a surprising outcome for auctions on this side of the belly. Additionally, this yield was just shy of the 2013 auction highs which hit 1.624% at the peak of Taper Tantrum mania in August. Furthermore, while Bids to Cover in the short end of the spectrum have been steadily rising in recent months, today’s auction saw a pronounced drop in the BTC from 2.61 to 2.42, the lowest since August, and well below the TTM average of 2.67. But the real story was in the internals, where Directs took down 11.8%, just shy of the 14.6% TTM average, but it was the Plunge in Indirects from 50% to half that number, or 25.8% that was the true surprise, as it was the lowest Indirect take down since December of 2008!

This meant that the natural backstop, Primary Dealers, had no choice but to buy 62.4% of the final allocation, the highest allotment since April of 2009. In other words, while the near end of the curve is well bid, things are starting to go bump in the night at or around the belly of the curve. Look for much more pain if indeed the Fed were to announce the start of tapering today.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/V39B3z7_5Rs/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Cripple Yourself While in Prison for Child Rape, Rake in the Americans with Disabilities Act Bucks

This from the L.A. Weekly is a couple of weeks old but
only came to my attention today, an interesting story about a man
in a wheelchair who has
sued Los Angeles businesses nearly 1,000 times for
violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Some details. Jon Carpenter had been a Sunday school teacher in
Utah arrested for sexual abuse of a minor in incidents involving
two 8-year-old girls. Then:

the day after he was sentenced in 1989, according to jail
reports, Carpenter stood atop his bunk bed and dove head-first into
the concrete floor. When a guard later asked if he’d jumped
intentionally, Carpenter replied, “Yes, I did, it’s better than
being in this place for six months.”

Two days later, the state of Utah informed Judge George E. Ballif that Carpenter was
a permanent quadriplegic and asked that Ballif “suspend execution
of the sentence until such time as the defendant has achieved
medical stability,” arguing that “further incarceration or therapy
in this matter would serve little purpose and in any event is not
appropriate at the present time.”

So the wheelchair-bound Carpenter moved to Los Angeles and
starting filing Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuits, nearly a
thousand so far in L.A. County alone, 257 in 2012 alone.

According to David Peters, who heads Lawyers Against Lawsuit
Abuse, Carpenter has sued 94 pharmacies for everything from steep
ramps and failure to remodel access areas to lack of Braille or
hearing-assistance technology for the blind and deaf.

Carpenter’s hearing and vision, Peters says, were perfectly
fine.

California is a rare state that lets people who allege an
ADA violation personally win pots of cash in court — $4,000 minimum
per violation, plus attorney’s fees, which can reach tens of
thousands of dollars.

Small businesses can be sued if the paper towel dispenser in the
bathroom is too high; the customer counter is too tall; aisles are
too narrow; or the grade of their wheelchair ramp is steeper than 3
percent.

But in California, defense attorney James Link says, those regulations run about
435 pages. “I had one case where the coat hook in the men’s
accessible stall at a P.F. Chang’s was
too high.”….

“California is the only jurisdiction on the planet that has
minimum financial damages for claims of this nature,” Peters says,
referring to the $4,000 floor. He estimates that 42 percent or more
of the nation’s ADA lawsuits are filed in California. “There are
lawyers who have moved from other states just to file these
lawsuits here,” he says. “It’s more profitable than [selling]
narcotics.”

According to Link, more than 3,000 ADA lawsuits were filed in
L.A. County in the last three years — more than 1,700 of them by
attorneys Morse Mehrban of L.A. and Mark Potter of San Diego’s Center for Disability
Access.

“I stand by every case,” Potter says via email. “This is an
important federal civil right that we are talking about.”

Link scoffs. “If you’re trying to clean up the stores and
restaurants that you frequent, that’s one thing. But if you are
going to 1,000 different businesses … that’s just trolling.”
(Mehrban, who didn’t respond to the Weekly‘s calls,
this year told ABC 7 News, “Isn’t every lawsuit technically
extortion?”)

Technically! Carpenter’s M.O.:

Carpenter and his current attorney, Potter, almost always target
mini-malls or small businesses, which must create parking spots for
special vans like the one he drives. They also must provide parking
lot space for a wheelchair to be lowered, and special signage. Get
a detail wrong — even the color of the sign — and
Carpenter can sue for $4,000 and up.

“We didn’t know that we needed a parking spot for a van,” says
Avi Hadid, owner of a mini-mall at Western Avenue and Washington
Boulevard. He settled with the convicted child abuser for $10,000 —
cheaper than hiring a lawyer. A friend of Hadid’s, who owns a gas
station, also was sued by Carpenter. “They say they’re going to
pay,” Hadid says. “I’m sure he made so much money from that, this
guy.”

My 1995 Reason
cover feature on the ADA’s ability to gin up lawsuit money for
nuisances while doing little to help those unable to walk, see, or
hear (the people most in need of the costly adjustments that ADA
often demands).

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/18/cripple-yourself-while-in-prison-for-chi
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Guess The Smogged City

Residents of this city woke on Wednesday to a third day of thick gray smog which has disrupted dozens of flights and train services and caused a rash of health complaints. As Reuters reports, the toxic levels of pollution, fuelled by industrial growth a surge in the numbers of vehicles crowding their roads, are more than 7x what the nation deems safe and what the US EPA calls “hazardous”. But it’s not in China…

The answer…

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/ZGwbhRRYVUo/story01.htm Tyler Durden

DOD Official Says Snowden Stole “Literally Everything”

An unnamed
“ranking Department of Defense official” has told The Daily Caller
that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden “stole everything — literally
everything.”

The Daily Caller’s reporting goes on to mention that
intelligence officials in the U.K. and the U.S. have considered the
possibility that Snowden may have a secret cache of information
that includes the locations of undercover intelligence workers,
which could act as an insurance policy against his capture.

From
The Daily Caller:

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden stole
vastly more information than previously speculated, and is holding
it at ransom for his own protection.

“What’s floating is so dangerous, we’d be behind for twenty
years in terms of access (if it were to be leaked),” a ranking
Department of Defense official told the Daily Caller.

Read Reason’s J.D. Tuccille’s blog post on the possible
cache
here.

Earlier this month, the editor of The Guardian said
that only
1 percent of the documents leaked by Snowden have been
published.

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