I don't understand the policy justification for requiring that a 401K be administered by the employer at all, rather than being similar to an IRA.
naturally nobody in congress seems the slightest bit interested
In 2002, the average [Congressional] pension payment ranged from $41,000 to $55,000. For example, a member of Congress who worked for 22 years and had a top three-year average salary of $153,900 would be eligible for a pension payment of $84,645 per year.
What are the tax advantages of a 401k (aside from any matching) as opposed to an IRA? Is it that payroll tax as well as income tax is avoided?
3: The main advantage is that you're allowed to put more money in a 401k - the IRA limit is something like $5000 this year, the 401k limit is $16,500.
So if you're the sort of person who fills up their tax-advantaged accounts, you are better off with IRA + 401k = $21,500 than with IRA alone = $5,000 in tax-advantaged savings per year.
I really hate all this shit. It's a personality flaw, and a really stupid one, but the sort of form-filling-out, sorting through arbitrary options, and so forth you need to do to take sensible advantage of all the tax deferred retirement options is something I find incredibly unpleasant and defeating, even when it's not all that much trouble objectively.
You know what else I don't understand? Why the hell flexible medical/childcare savings accounts require that any unspent money in them be forfeited rather than just taken as taxable income. On what planet does that make any sense at all?
Also, I think 401k contributions are still subject to payroll tax; you still have to pay FICA, SDI, and Medicare tax on that income, just not "Income Tax".
1: I don't completely understand either, but if there's a non-corrupt reason it's probably either (a) to make matching contributions easier to administer, or (b) to make it easier for people to contribute to their retirement account, since signing up for a 401k often requires somewhat less initiative than opening an IRA.
Also, probably a little bit of (c) to make the difference between defined-benefit and defined-contribution less obvious; if you have a 401k you're basically responsible for your own retirement income, no one is on the hook except you if you didn't save enough. But if your employer administers it, it still feels a little bit like they're offering a meaningful retirement plan.
7: Flexible Spending Accounts. Don't get me started. Why, in order to receive tax breaks for my kid's daycare, do I have to have money taken out of my paycheck to sit in a bank someplace until such a time as I can be bothered to get a bunch of receipts in order - receipts that represent money which would be significantly easier to scrape together if it hadn't been previously sequestered in a bank account someplace, earning interest for someone else.
Why is paying once in the pay check and once out of pocket and then later getting the paycheck portion back better than just paying once out of pocket?
you are better off with IRA + 401k = $21,500 than with IRA alone
As long as the IRA is a ROTH. I got screwed one year because I used a regular IRA, which apparently you can't do in conjunction with a 401(k). The 401(k) salesman dude did not mention this fact, but the IRS sure as hell noticed.
6: As if that weren't enough already, if your income is somewhere near the phase-out zone for IRAs, and has any unpredictability at all, then you don't know how much you can put in what kind of IRA until after you've done your taxes for that year.
Of course, one could easily avoid this problem by forgoing enough income to sit comfortably under the phaseout band...
9: I think the idea is that if you have front-end controls on the disbursement of money, you don't need to spend as much on back-end fraud detection. In other words, if you don't get reimbursed until you can document that it's a tax-deductible expense, then the IRS doesn't need to have as many auditors on staff to check people's tax returns & receipts at the end of the year. And if your documentation is inadequate, you get a request for more documentation, instead of, say, a scary-as-hell full audit.
Of course, some of this just offloads the expense onto the FSA administrator, who transfers the cost to you by not paying a interest on your FSA account.
10: Yes, yes, thanks for pointing that out, I'd hate for my amateur advice to get anyone in trouble! I do think ROTHs are underrated, though, and more people should consider them.
11.2: But none of that justifies the 'if you don't spend it, it's forfeited' bit. That makes no sense at all.
You know what really drove me nuts? I used to have an FSA that gave us a debit card to spend with. So I'd pay the dentist with the FSA. Charge coming from a dentist, identified as being for dental work. And then six months later I'd get a letter demanding receipts. What information does a receipt from the dentist tell the FSA administrator that getting a charge directly from the dentist's office didn't?
I don't really see how employers could do the employer match or profit sharing part of 401(k) contribution if they didn't have some kind of role in administering the plans; maybe there's a way, but they certainly couldn't just write a check to the employees and tell them to deposit it in the 401(k) account. The main 401(k) advantage to employers is that they can replace post-tax direct compensation with pre-tax contributions to 401(k)s, so you'd need some kind of regulation to make sure that the employer contribution actually ended up in a 401(k) account.
The real problem is the limited number of funds offered by the financial services firms who contract to administer the plans; there probably ought to be a requirement that each plan have no-load index funds as an option, I guess, and better disclosure, or maybe the rule should be that you can just automatically invest in any registered mutual fund.
maybe there's a way
Have some method for investment firms to register as 401(k) administrators, set up your 401(k) account where you like, and tell your employer to direct deposit into your qualified 401(k) account. This doesn't seem hard at all.
I think it is safe to assume that anything in which the financial services industry has its grubby little fingers has been made deliberately complicated and unpleasant so as to maximize the probability of errors which favor banks, financial advisers, tax preparers and the like, and to make a failure to use their services a financially risky proposition.
All this 401k, IRA, flexible spending ladida could be simplified down to the point where a person with a high school education could do their own financial planning and tax preparation in a few hours a year. The people capable of writing five figure checks to political campaigns and PACs do not want it that way, so it isn't.
I forfeited a few hundred bucks two years in a row in my FSA because I couldn't get the receipts together. I'm a moron, but I'm sure I'm not alone.
9: I'm sure thats the idea, in which case its another example of paranoia about fraud leading to bad policy (combined with a great deal of lobbying from the FSA-managing finance industry, I'm sure.)
Maybe if peoples money wasn't sequestered in FSAs the Treasury would have less need to send out stimulus checks at the beginning of every recession.
One year I forfeited $800 because the FSA company lost my receipts and I couldn't prove it.
Well, I guess a problem with 15 is that you'd then be shifting the person who pays for the plan administration from the employer to the employee.
17: I've done that. I've also put less in an FSA than I eventually spent on qualified expenses because I was afraid of doing it.
20: I thought the employee paid for administration anyway. Isn't that the whole point of Yglesias's gripe, that he can't figure out how much the fees are?
16 is exactly what led into my rant in the OP.
I meant administering the costs of the plan itself, as opposed to paying for the fees of a mutual fund. If you open an IRA, you pay some kind of fee to the service that administers the IRA, in addition to the mutual fund fees. But I'm really just arguing for the sake of arguing.
Speaking of Yglesias, he's been blogging up a storm today. He's doing some of the, "finding clever ways to express the obvious objections to really bad ideas" that he's good at. I like these lines:
So keep in mind that this is the metric by which Paul Ryan wants you to judge him. If you believe George W Bush unleashed an unprecedented economic boom with great jobs performance, rising incomes, and the paying off of the national debt then you'll find a lot to like about Rep Ryan's plan.
The essence of Paul Ryan's Ryan Ripoff budget is hiding the ball. Steep cuts in Medicare--but not for anyone who's old today! Giant tax cuts for the rich--but tax hikes for the middle class!
and, slightly less pithy,
There are a few basic differences between the progressive approach and the Ryan Ripoff approach here. The main one is that the progressive approach is aimed at actually making Medicare more efficient. ... The Ryan Ripoff goes in the other direction, not only cutting Medicare spending by directing the remaining spending through the wringer of rent-seeking private insurance firms who'll siphon off a healthy percentage of it.
24: Fair enough. I get wound up about this stuff because it hits me right in the personality flaws -- there are people for whom keeping on top of this sort of financial mishegoss isn't particularly difficult, and I know that objectively it really isn't that bad, and I should be able to cope without screwing things up. In practice, I'm always faxing stuff places at the last minute, getting my forms wrong, not signing up for a 401(k) until months after I've started at a new job, and I hate it all.
I really hate all this shit. It's a personality flaw, and a really stupid one, but the sort of form-filling-out, sorting through arbitrary options, and so forth you need to do to take sensible advantage of all the tax deferred retirement options is something I find incredibly unpleasant and defeating, even when it's not all that much trouble objectively.
Preach it, sister.
Avoiding things that you don't understand and will never understand isn't a "personality flaw". Avoiding negotiating, on behalf of yourself, who knows nothing, with people who negotiate every day and know everything, isn't a "personaliy flaw". It's just that money-obsession isn't one of the hobbies you're interested in.
12: Yeah, I have absolutely no explanation for that part that stands up to the least bit of reflection. I know this ruins my Panglossian credibility...
"Why the hell flexible medical/childcare savings accounts require that any unspent money in them be forfeited rather than just taken as taxable income."
I put $2000 in one of those accounts for child care until I found out I was not eligible. I had my work write me a check and I reported it as income. Luckily, I wasn't audited.
28: But the outcome is important enough that the rational thing to do is to get over my distaste for the process and cope. I didn't like changing diapers, either, but you do what you have to do, and it didn't bother me all that much. Letting distaste for filling out forms bother me enough to practically impact what I'm saving for retirement (which, at times, I have) is nuts.
Here is an article about how FSAs now suck more than ever. Apparently no more topping off your spending by purchasing a bunch of non-prescription drugs at the end of the year.
That the FSA was an innovation of the Clinton Administration reminds me that Democrats can't be trusted either.
25:...directing the remaining spending through the wringer of rent-seeking private insurance firms who'll siphon off a healthy percentage of it.
Obamacare!
I wish I could trust Democrats as the gatekeepers, but they seems just as determined as Republicans to kill some program so that they can wear the badge of deficit reduction for the upcoming election. The badge itself seems much more important than what it takes to get it. Democrats are itching to kill something, anything, so they can put the notch on their gun, and that is the most worrisome part. "We don't need no stinkin' badges!," but it looks like that's what we are going to get.
But Barack Obama is now the party's leader. And let's be frank: Obama still, after all that has happened, seems devoted to the dream of transcending partisanship, a dream he tries to serve by being nice to Republican ideas no matter how terrible those ideas are. (I did warn about this during the primaries -- just saying.)The great danger now is that Obama -- with the help of a fair number of Senate Democrats -- will kill Medicare in the name of civility and outreach
Is Yggles' despicable hackery too fucking subtle for you? Yggles and Klein play the game of gasping with horror at Republican initiatives so they can painfully approve the wisdom of Obama's forthcoming sorrowful but wise compromise.
I don't care what Ryan or Republicans say. The Senate can block, Obama can veto, and no compromise is necessary.
The Ryan budget is only more interesting than the Repub plans to kill the EPA, Planned Parenthood, or all the anti-choice moves if "someone" refuses to laugh at it, ignore it, or tries to compromise with it. If attention is being focused on it it means some people want to use it as a baseline or wish to propose something evil and use Ryan to make their villainy look good in comparison.
I forfeited a few hundred bucks two years in a row in my FSA because I couldn't get the receipts together. I'm a moron
I have a hard time believing a FSA is really worth anyone's time. How much are you actually going to save a year in income tax off of your payments for things like dentist visits and doctor co-pays? I guess maybe if you're spending 10k a year on child care or meds or something but every time I've had someone try to sell me on an FSA the description of the process makes me want to punch them in the face.
32 & 35- This. I gave up on health FSA this year because I was sick of stacks of receipts for $10 copays, they kept asking for receipts on things charged to the debit cards.
The only advantage of the health one is you can use it all up front, if you leave your job partway through the year but have spent more than your contributions your company eats the difference. That also makes reimbursements easier.
Child care I am using even though it's more annoying, it's easier to project- I know what preschool costs for the year, even if my wife doesn't make enough to have her gross income be more than the FSA it just gets reimbursed and taxed as income. The reimbursement rules are ridiculous, though- we pay preschool by semester, so I cut a $3k check in Jan for Feb-June and can submit a receipt immediately. However, they reject it unless I wait to submit until after June because the child care hasn't been delivered yet- are there really that many people running an FSA scam by prepaying tuition, getting reimbursed, then withdrawing and getting a tuition refund?
I have trouble even reading this thread, the topic makes me so angry, I feel my pulse elevating, I need to take break, I have nothing useful to contribute and if I let myself get into a discussion of this it will just be a stream of profanities.
13- There are services dentists provide that are not covered by FSAs, such as teeth whitening or other cosmetic procedures (which leads to arguments about whether braces in adults are cosmetic or not.)
In fact, the only time I'm not bothered for receipts on a debit card is when the provider is clearly health related (doctor's office) AND the amount is something certainly health related ($10 copay at doctor, $50 copay at ER.) Any other amount or location is questioned.
Agree with LB about this. I have a medical FSA or something that I don't know what possessed me to set up, since as far as I know my insurance covers everything just fine. In fact, now that you mention it, I don't remember choosing to set it up at all, I think it was just an error by my employer... but it's been too easy to put off figuring that out for another day, and then another week or two, and then I'm four months into the year and the door is probably closed on that.
Oh.
Finance? Close them down and take their stuff. National consumer bank.
401-ks? Bad idea. If private industry can't give us a defined-benefit plan, tax them til they bleed and let gov't handle retirement
Next?
I feel like the thread isn't complete without also taking note of the fact that 401k match programs are especially evil when real wages are the lowest point in 50 years. So that way when people "choose" not to max their contribution the company can justify their shitty retirement plan by blaming the employee.
It is a bunch of very smart people motivated solely by the premise that redistributing money from middle-class people and poor people and into their own hands will make them extraordinarily weathy.
Absent financial innovation, the options for small savers are shitty postal banks that don't pay interest, payday loans, or hoarded currency in a mattress. Mortgage-backed securities and shadow banking are huge problems, but overregulation produces an environment that people will try to escape.
If you want to make a serious criticism of finance, I think that the two apparently intractable problems are
1) the intractability of imposing capital requirements on the shadow banking system
and
2) The failure of capital market to allocate effectively, as shown by huge cash reserves of limited liability corporation. Felix Salmon had a really good column about this:
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/02/14/why-the-stock-market-is-increasingly-irrelevant/
as well as co-opting legislators, but I do not think that's a problem specific to finance.
I have no idea what the purpose of the forfeiture of unspent funds is, and it's annoyed me to lose a few hundred or have to go run and buy an unnecessary pair of glasses, but two things to keep in mind. (1) As long as what you forfeit, as a percentage of the money you put in, is less than your marginal tax rate, you're still coming out ahead (though I guess I'd rather the government get the taxes I would have paid than my plan get the funds I didn't spend). (2) I doubt this is its purpose, but the forfeit rule is at least a moderate damper on the inequality-promoting effects of FSAs--people who could afford to defer some substantial extra money until the end of the plan year could very easily make all their qualifying expenses de facto tax free, by deliberately overfunding their account to cover all conceivable-but-unexpected expenses (under the current rules, which impose no cap on FSAs, but I take it this is changing soon).
I don't count savings accounts and check cashing as "financial innovation." Or are you saying that without the profits from liar loans that banks wouldn't be able to offer basic services and we'd all be forced to use the corner store check cashing service?
Not to wax Shearerist, but I rather appreciate the finance sector. Double-entry bookkeeping, secured lending, insurance, public bourses, risk hedging, etc., etc., all seem like valuable advances. I suppose I could come up with some complaints about collar-popping Chets, NYC real estate prices and what certain people deserve to be paid vis-à-vis other, more virtuous people, but progress requires capital, and the capital markets seem a better way to allocate it than to endow Commissar McManus with the powers of life, death and budgeting that he so craves.
OT: Today I made a protein smoothie with pomegranate seeds, carrots and spinach. And soy milk. Inexplicably, I am not Gwyneth Paltrow.
And here we go...
Ezra Klein
How to do Ryan's Healthcare Reform Right
As a general point, I'm not against more choice in Medicare. The Rivlin-Domenici plan (pdf) had a pretty good proposal: You could stay in traditional Medicare or choose a private plan. Either way, if your plan was growing faster than GDP+1 percent, you'd have to pay the difference. The idea would essentially convert Medicare into a universal version of the Affordable Care Act, albeit with a strong public option, and a way to enlist richer seniors in the fight for cost control.
Fucking piece of shit knew the plan when he cheered the ACA
45: So you appreciate a bunch of innovations that are all at least a hundred years old? You might as well thank them for running water while you're at it.
45: the capital markets seem a better way to allocate it
For some values of "better". The thing is, the capital markets aren't, and haven't been for some time, what drives the financial industry. I can't remember what the ratio is, partly because it keeps going up and up and up, but the secondary market has been vastly larger than the issuing market for a long time. Also, while their would obviously be drawbacks the the Commisar McManus plan, or to a plebiscite or whatever, it's hardly as though the current system is the most efficient imaginable way of allocating capital. Especially on the very front end, with venture capital, you're talking about very small, secretive, undemocratic cliques of the very wealthy making bets on which huckster can bring his or her scheme to the point of a common stock issue most adroitly. With nary a whiff of concern for what that project will do to, for instance, the environment, or the working poor, or pre-existing corporations. As I've said for a long time, I wish I could sit down with these fellows with the "100% Hustler" T-shirts and make them understand that no, slangin' rocks for a few thousand a month is NOT real hustling, rather, real hustlers are working for boutique investment banks, making millions for setting up meetings between different groups of old, rich white guys. It's the biggest and best scam anyone has ever invented. Besides religion. And government. And disposable safety razors.
And here we go... Ezra Klein
Yeah, I'm generally fond of Ezra's blogging, but I haven't been impressed lately.
The contrast with Yglesias today is striking -- Yglesias has explicitly defined a conflict, picked a side, and is advocating for it. Ezra is combining advocacy with general speculatation/reportage and the mix isn't good at the moment.
I haven't been impressed lately.
Like, the last year. Come to think, has he been off his feed since moving to the Post?
Savings accounts that actually pay interest where you can expect the bank to stay open in times of financial uncertainty are indeed a financial innovation, not common either globally or historically.
Look, I agree that Citi and Goldman Sachs are predatory and dishonest. But having free access to capital markets is much, much better than the alternatives facing people elsewhere in the world. Germany and maybe the UK, not sure, are OK. But France, Mexico, Japan are lousy places for ordinary people to manage their savings.
I've now read the thread-- the lifecycle funds offered with really low fees by at least Vanguard and Fidelity are a way to avoid all the tedious research and decision-making without getting skinned. Online brokerages are another big innovation for retail customers-- brokers used to treat little people like absolute shit. Not to do what they were told, to the customer's detriment and charge extortionately for it.
Oh sweet Jesus
I wouldn't be surprised if, a year from now, it's broadly agreed that the main thing Paul Ryan's budget did was persuade Democrats -- and perhaps some Republicans -- to adopt something pretty close to the Fiscal Commission's recommendations (which are currently being turned into legislation by a bipartisan group of senators).That Ryan's shown political courage by proposing difficult and even dangerous policy ideas can't be denied.
Is the Fiscal Commission's plan perfect? Not even close. But it's a lot more reasonable, and a lot less ideological, than Ryan's budget. And I think Ryan's budget is going to persuade a lot of Democrats to give it a second look.
Digby & Kevin Drum on Ryan's "courage"
Drum:
Courageous. Serious. Gutsy. I imagine that within a few days this will be the consensus view of the entire Beltway punditocracy. A plan dedicated almost entirely to slashing social spending in a country that's already the stingiest spender in the developed world, while simultaneously cutting taxes on the rich in a country with the lowest tax rates in the developed world -- well, what could be more serious than that?
I think I'm going to be sick.
Me too. (Digby)
Me Three.
Someone told me that Germany regulates its finance sector with the intent of keeping it at a less "sophisticated" level. They seem to be doing okay without any of these giant insurance-lender-stock-broker-hedge-funds.
Savings accounts that actually pay interest where you can expect the bank to stay open in times of financial uncertainty are indeed a financial innovation, not common either globally or historically.
That's all due to an innovation from 1934, the FDIC.
49: I'm not sure I understand the moral flaw of the secondary market. Is the only acceptable investment an inalienable annuity? As for "very small, secretive, undemocratic cliques": the costs, financial and moral, of registering and surveilling every possible association of potential investors seem pretty big. As for "the environment, or the working poor, or pre-existing corporations": I don't think I said anything that would preclude the enforcement of environmental or similar laws; I sympathize with the working poor, but not so much as to wish everyone lived by equitable subsistence farming; I'm not sure what right pre-existing corporations have against competition or supercession.
Savings accounts that actually pay interest where you can expect the bank to stay open in times of financial uncertainty are indeed a financial innovation, not common either globally or historically.
Doesn't this have more to do with the FDIC than with the innovations of the finance sector?
Flippanter's list notwithstanding, the innovations we've seen in the past decade have been very very bad indeed, mostly aimed at fucking people over to the benefit of a tiny clique of sociopathic assholes. There is no reason capital markets can't function perfectly well with a short leash on exploitative practices. There might be slightly lower growth or efficiency, but these are not the most important values by which good government is measured by a long shot.
..and partially pwned on preview by spike.
but I rather appreciate the finance sector. Double-entry bookkeeping, secured lending, insurance, public bourses, risk hedging, etc., etc., all seem like valuable advances. I suppose I could come up with some complaints about collar-popping Chets, NYC real estate prices and what certain people deserve to be paid vis-à-vis other, more virtuous people,
Yes, it's a real struggle to put your finger on any calamities that the financial sector has directly caused.
In terms of the most recent round financial innovations, high-speed automated algorithmic trading seem particularly evil. And dangerous.
Tax it to oblivion, I say.
It is always slightly depressing to me that discussions of the financial sector and fiscal policy rouse more, and hotter, emotions than discussions that relate to killing people, singly or en masse.
But France, Mexico, Japan are lousy places for ordinary people to manage their savings.
Do you have any evidence for this? France and Japan strike me as two of the best places in the world to be an old person. That's not quite the same thing as managing one's savings, but in practical terms it amounts to about the same thing.
The main moral flaw of the transfer of capital into the shadow banking system is that it's even more full of fraudsters and profit skimmers, and even more prone to systemic collapse, than the ordinary capital markets. It's generally the moderately wealthy who are being fleeced, though, except when the shadow banking system leads to global near-collapse . . . oh wait, that just happened.
I'm fine with a very considerable role for finance; if you're going to have a private sector, you need a financial services industry. I don't think it's possible to look at the amount of wealth taken by vs. the benefits conferred by the current set up of the financial services industry in the United States and conclude that we have a particularly good model. There's no reason why our financial services sector should be as big as it is (as a share of the total economy) or as profitable as it is.
60: You've made this comparison multiple times. It's still bullshit.
60: Yes, but nothing gets us as worked up as bad cooking or bad grammar.
60: I suppose - in me, at least - it's easier to imagine being wildly recklessly greedy than to imagine carrying out murder. So when discussing killings, it's more tempting to keep things very academic and impersonal, because it would be so much more disturbing to connect with the impulse.
62: Fuck you.
63: Didn't we, in times past, have a lot of long "dating" threads?
64: Probably. Also easier to imagine being robbed or cheated than murdered/bombed/massacred.
60 really is the worst kind of bullshit. Care to cite some specific examples? I'm not really sure how a pro-banker, anti-war stance conveys upon one particular moral authority.
66: 60 hardly pretends to moral authority. Finding things depressing hasn't conferred moral stature since Young Werther.
Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.
You see an outlaw might kill the whole family, but he won't repossess their home.
I can't believe I'm taking Flippanter's side against Woody Guthrie.
I fucking like living in Omelas. Keeps me humble.
...it's easier to imagine being wildly recklessly greedy than to imagine carrying out murder.
I am the opposite. I want a new monitor, but not very badly. That is all. I don't have any idea what I would do with $5000.
But...never mind.
Over a large enough scale, financial malfeasance turns into killing. People die younger when they're poor. (Seriously, I have family over a broad financial range, and the difference between upper middle class 70 and working class 70 in terms of health is very disturbing.)
65.2: Are you referring to those long discussions of how we could never date someone that was ungrammatical and/or ate canned pasta?
71: Sidebar on the "really hot" safe harbor, your honor?
65.2: Too many married front page bloggers. Heebie, Apo, Alameida and I are all not personally involved in dating these days. Which leaves Stanley and Ben as the only source of dating posts.
That fruit was positively subterranean.
52: brokers used to treat little people like absolute shit. Not to do what they were told, to the customer's detriment and charge extortionately for it.
Actually, I think there's evidence that the growth of discount brokerages, and particularly their online appendages, has provided the traditional wire houses with even more of an incentive to fuck over the little guy. It was what, 10 years ago now, that Merrill pushed everyone with assets under 25K into call center hell? And even if you're a middling-large investor, somebody in that 250K AUM sweet spot, where you're supposedly getting the best service and the fewest fees, you're still getting the shaft most of the time, it's just presented to you with a bigger smile. All of that horseshit about how much your broker cares is just a shuck, the ol' okey-doke. It's marketing, to sell you more of their products.
56: I'm not claiming that the secondary market is inherently flawed. I'm sure there are any number of tweaks you could do, notwithstanding a complete overhaul, that would make it much, much better from an individual investor standpoint as well as from a social good standpoint. But the fact is, the track we've been on for some time is to tweak it and overhaul it in exactly the opposite direction. So it's not inherently flawed, but it is definitely flawed. As mentioned above, it is precisely the innovations of the secondary markets -- the ever-more-complicated derivatives strategies, the drives to amend the tax code to favor more short-term trading, the automated trading programs, the repeal of Glass-Steagall -- that have put us in the mess we're in now. To reiterate: If you're using the existence of the capital markets as an excuse for why there should be a less-restrictive secondary market, and the existence of that secondary market to justify the current structure of capital markets, then you're caught in a particularly vicious tautology.
"Predatory financial sector? #FirstWorldProblems"
I do like dating posts -- handing out poorly founded advice makes me feel all rich in wisdom and experience rather than aging and dull, which is how I've been feeling lately. Someone should write in with a dating problem to cheer me up.
68: You see an outlaw might kill the whole family, but he won't repossess their home.
Yeah, except Pretty Boy Floyd didn't kill any entire families. Not even one. And as LB points out, the ultimate effects of financial malfeasance, then and now, are the same as more lurid forms of criminality.
The inherent evils of capital aside, you'd think for 30% of GDP or whatever it is these days, we'd get top-drawer capital allocation services. Turns out not.
Someone should write in with a dating problem to cheer me up.
Dear Mineshaft:
How great a difference in the heights/weights of a possible couple is too great, realistically? Socially? Mechanically?
Yours truly,
Not William Howard Taft
77: Except, of course, for the usurious profits gained by transferring remittance payments internationally.
81 -- AWB had a good line somewhere about how the only relationships that last are those between people who meet the level of attractiveness to which each one believes themselves to be entitled (on the basis of their own good looks, wealth, social position, whatever). So I say, not much difference.
Or, rather, even a little bit of a difference is too great.
81: I knew a guy in college who was either 6'8" or 6'10" who married a woman who was maybe 5'2" or 3". They divorced eventually, but I don't think the size difference was an issue. I think so long as the smaller partner isn't getting lost under the couch cushions, it's all good.
Sure, tall guy and short woman can work. Probably not the reverse, though.
I think so long as the smaller partner isn't getting lost under the couch cushions, it's all good.
I will pay somebody -- anybody -- US$50 to keep me from ever learning that this is a fetish for somebody.
There is no reason capital markets can't function perfectly well with a short leash on exploitative practices.
Agree with this for some value of short, but that's a far cry from financiers are scum.
France, Japan
I know French and Japanese who use family connections to move their money out of their home countries. Japanese retail savings in particular is really limited-- it's very hard for Japanese to diversify away from the Japanese economy.
IMO the most difficult problems are those I mentioned in 42. I sure don't have answers, or even a good framework for weighing costs/benefits of alternatives to defective free markets.
Lamenting the plight of the poor is IMO not the right way to enumerate costs, since a shitty economy hits the protected poor hardest, and they vote with their feet to go someplace looser.
86: I believe Chris Y would beg to differ. As would my big sister, who's only rarely dated taller than herself.
There may be intervening factors. But I still like 83 as a general rule.
Is that the voice of a tall guy protecting his turf, or a short guy being bitter?
90: 83 is a pretty predictive rule, I expect, but I wonder how much information about two* people would have to be given to a panel of disinterested parties before the panel could predict whether the relationship would survive a year.
* Call me old-fashioned.
Isn't that fetish called giantism?
Damn. I was gunning for that $50, and you had to go mess it up.
91 -- the former. Gotta defend what turf I have!
77: Predatory financial sector? #FirstWorldProblems
I'm fairly sure the second and third worlds have some pretty good financial predation. Meet your friendly local Rajasthani grainbroker/moneylender/landowner.
Sorry, "giantess fetish" or macrophilia. My mistake.
Tall woman/short man makes for very awkward/uncomfortable simultaneous oral sex ("69", as the kids say). The height difference has to be fairly significant before it becomes a problem, though. Tall man/short woman is much less of an issue, due to the different anatomic layouts.
That's why you never saw a tall woman and a short man together on the veldt.
OT: I just got emailed a link to this program, which I can't use but may be of interest to the job-anxious humanities Ph.D. folks here:
http://www.acls.org/programs/publicfellows/
It matters not one iota what political party is in power, or what President holds the reins of office. We are not politicians, or public thinkers; we are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how; but we intend to keep it if we can by throwing all the tremendous weight of our support, our influence, our money, our political connection, our purchased senators, our hungry congressmen, and our public-speaking demagogues into the scale against any legislation, any political platform, any Presidential campaign, that threatens the integrity of our estate.--Frederick Townsend Martin*, The Passing of the Idle Rich 1913
*A class traitor--he was of the Bradley-Martin Ball Martins. (I thought this was relevant to some point earlier in the thread that I cannot now recall, so I'll count it as my mcmanus solidarity comment of the day.)
Does one still call physically impossible sexual interests fetishes, or is there a different term? Like, the whole dinosaurs interfering wrongfully with motor vehicles genre -- under the assumption that someone out there is actually getting off on that, is it a fetish, exactly?
the whole dinosaurs interfering wrongfully with motor vehicles genre -- under the assumption that someone out there is actually getting off on that, is it a fetish, exactly?
Why do you ask?
Like, the whole dinosaurs interfering wrongfully with motor vehicles genre....
1. For God's sake.
2. Somebody just lost herself another $50.
Purely out of concern for the virtue of the motor vehicles involved.
103: You really don't click on Apo's links, do you?
105: I don't click anything that doesn't promise a free iPod.
Hey, that was my link!
I'm hurt.
Millard Quincy Roosevelt really isn't providing enough detail about the potential relationship.
You just feel left out because dinosaurs appear to have no interest in your bicycle.
104: Auto-erotic interruptionist.
Don't make me link to bicycle-related fetish art, LB. Nobody wants that.
Sure, tall guy and short woman can work. Probably not the reverse, though.
The Health Inspector's my height (5'10" or so) and has told me that she's gone out with plenty of guys who've been intimidated by her height. She says she usually wears flats on a first date for just that reason.
108: Woman shorter, height difference more than a foot, weight difference commensurate, anything ahem physical likely to be delayed (work, schoolwork, one of the two just got out of a lousy relationship anyway), high school classmates reconnected by stupid Facebook.
113: either of you a car? A dragon?
114: I miss Transformers: Beast Wars, too.
I think Witt's complained, at 5'8", about internet dates being put off by her height. There's probably a 5'8" to 5'10" or so range that's particularly difficult, because it'd be where you'd be likeliest to run into men misrepresenting their own heights -- nothing more embarrassing than a 5'9" woman meeting a 5'11" man, and being significantly taller than he is. (I don't actually know how much that happens. I do recall a friend in high school where I grew three inches every time I visited her house, because her father was officially 5'9", and while I was 5'7" everyplace else, I was an inch taller than him.)
Woman shorter, height difference more than a foot, weight difference commensurate
Sounds fine to me.
115: No. Same circle, little interaction.
113: That doesn't sound socially difficult at all. Think of yourself as following in the time-honored footsteps of Moose and Midge.
119: So, who crushed on who? Or if not, why the interest now?
121: She brought up the dating thing first, presumably because of tiger blood, Adonis DNA.
Cryptic Ned's fiancee is that much shorter than he is, and he's never mentioned it as a problem. Is there anything particular you're worried about -- you'll look funny together, you've never been attracted to tiny women and aren't sure if you're attracted to her, you're afraid you'll injure her during sex?
To address your actual concern, my older brother is over a foot taller than his wife and they've been married for over 30 years. My younger (but also older than me) brother is about a foot taller than his wife and they are approaching their 30th anniversary.
I'm 5'2" and never dated anyone under 6'2". Everything worked fine. I think "69" is a waste in general, though.
I will say that if you get married, putting you in a black suit and her in a wide-skirted fluffy white dress will make you look like a walking stick marrying a snowball. But that's a premature concern.
123: General clumsiness, feeling of always looming. Somewhat less acutely, the possibility of looking funny together.
I can't find a photo, but if Eric Montross' wife is the same woman he was dating when he graduated from UNC, there's approximately a two-foot difference there and they have a couple kids.
I'm just a bit taller than oudemia, and I've dated women ranging from slightly shorter to much taller. Relationships involving height difference, though sometimes awkward physically, are no worse than relationships in general. </Emerson>
Tweety and I have that much height difference. (I am built like a small ox, so the weight difference might not be as great.) We're still getting along fine.
Does one still call physically impossible sexual interests fetishes, or is there a different term?
I don't think the concept of "fetish" ever required that it be something physically feasible.
OED:
Psychol. An object, a non-sexual part of the body, or a particular action which abnormally serves as the stimulus to, or the end in itself of, sexual desire.
(I am built like a small ox, so the weight difference might not be as great.)
But I am built like an enormous ox! Also, Blume is lying to you, people.
130: That's funny, I wouldn't have thought so. I wonder if I'm remembering you as taller than you are, or him as shorter. Or, I suppose, both.
I'LL SHOW YOU ENORMOUS OX. YOU'RE PROBABLY NOT EVEN BLUE.
134: don't make me link to those pictures of you and that minivan.
But I am built like an enormous ox!
Pretty sure that someone owes me $50 now.
Also, Blume is lying to you, people.
I wasn't being self-deprecating. I am fucking strong. (Don't want to fight Megan, though.)
Also, Blume is lying to you, people.
You aren't still getting along fine? That's too bad.
137: I defy you to find an ox that can do handstands.
139: And there's another $50 for Flip.
Another marriage with that height difference here, and not sure what you mean by "commensurate" weight difference but ours fluctuates (exclusing pregnancy) from probably like 70-85 lbs. Never an issue.
I know a couple where the fella is 5' 5" or so, and the gal is 5' 9"+, and their son just celebrated his 9th birthday. And they always seem pretty happy together.
Per my late grandfather: "Never trust a short man, he hates you for every inch that you're taller than him." I don't personally subscribe to that philosophy, although I have seen some solid anecdotal evidence to support it.
I am also built like an ox, and would gladly fight Megan if I had any reason to. But not Tweety, he's too sweaty.
133: as far as that, I'm sort of built like a short person, and have a theory that I tend to come off shorter than I am.
"Never trust a short man, he hates you for every inch that you're taller than him."
This short man hates everyone who actually believes this. And Randy Newman.
I'm sort of built like a short person
This seems hard to carry off without the actual, you know, shortness.
I am 5'5" and the whole question makes me cross. Lately I'm oversensitized to the way that "tall" is automatically grouped with positive descriptors. I mean not enraged by it or anything but just...cranky.
I would leap to Blume's defense (from herself) and say she is nothing like an Ox* but I have earned, categorically, the most humiliating animal descriptor there is. I, alas, am a pocket cub.
*There is nothing like an Ox, nothing in the world/There is nothing you could..um..box, that is anything like an Ox.
I would guess it means that Sifu's got a long torso and short legs?
147: I don't know that that's necessarily true; wouldn't somebody who is 5'6" (say) who is skinny with long legs and arms seem taller than somebody who was the same height, but stocky, with short legs and stubby little fingers? I argue "probably".
I think Tweety means he's short where it counts.
152: don't make me google "ox penis" at work.
148: perhaps you should instead stick with google's suggested alternative?
I, alas, am a pocket cub.
I believe that makes you a baby kangaroo.
pocket cub
I think you're confusing marsupials and placentals.
146: Yeah, I've always had good experiences with short men, but then I'm fat, so there's some commonality about not performing masculinity the right way.
The same-time-stamp pwn is particularly satisfying.
I am 5'6" and one of my brothers is 6'2". I am pretty sure that being 6'2" would be excellent.
I am apparently one of these people whom everyone thinks is taller than actual measurements would indicate. It may be the enormous hair.
160: Yeah but I added ... fancier words.
||
How's this for weirdness in the age of Google: A friend just reconnected with her HS boyfriend, whom she had been told, by many people, had been killed in Iraq. Isn't that the kind of thing you'd want to double-check before you started spreading it around? Bizarre.
||>
I'm another example of >1 foot height advantage (just over). Also long torso compared to legs. And for probably half of our relationship I've been >2x weight--even when in pretty decent shape.
The gracefully elongated body-type probably does it. You're 5'9" or so?
161: I've envied my sister at 6'1". I don't know that I'd actually want to be that tall if given the option, but it does look like fun.
162: I had you pegged as being on the tall side.
165: Comparisons are to my wife.
A friend of mine has a pair of dogs which have combined weight less than my cat. None of them are in a relationship with the others, though.
Ectomorph's appear to be shorter than really are. Mesomorph's appear to be taller than they really are. God only knows why.
Lately I'm oversensitized to the way that "tall" is automatically grouped with positive descriptors.
This is true, and weird. I noticed a while back that I'll reach for 'little' to flesh out a string of epithets ("Why, you rotten no-good little sonovabitch," or similar) when there's no reason for it, and have tried to break the habit. (Not, of course, the habit of addressing people with strings of epithets.)
Brad DeLong said Josh Marshall was shrill yesterday.
No, Ian Welsh is shrill.
Modern Americans are mostly descended from people who didn't say "this pisshole country is worth fighting for", they're descended from people who said "screw this, I'm outta here". Emulate them and leave, if you can't leave do the other thing they were willing to do: prepare for a revolution and be willing to die in it.Or accept your fate as slaves.
Your choice.
Except for "prepare for a revolution and be willing to die in it." but I guess you have to be little careful about what you say. Or what Patton said.
"Absent financial innovation, the options for small savers are shitty postal banks that don't pay interest, payday loans, or hoarded currency in a mattress. Mortgage-backed securities and shadow banking are huge problems, but overregulation produces an environment that people will try to escape. "
I would say this is better than fooling people into thinking interactions with banks make them better off, or that by saving they can get ahead and saving is more important than having a steady paycheck
Guys, it's not the height differential per se that matters, it's the attractiveness differential.
That doesn't really explain how Tweety got Blume to like him, I guess.
Working off the combined attraction of the man/bicycle unit? With a goodlooking enough bike, that can make up for a lot.
||
Hey, heebie, remember we said not to be worried about cell phone radiation even if there was one study that showed something-or-other? Turned out maybe it didn't show something-or-other at all.
|>
"I think Witt's complained, at 5'8", about internet dates being put off by her height. There's probably a 5'8" to 5'10" or so range that's particularly difficult, because it'd be where you'd be likeliest to run into men misrepresenting their own heights -- nothing more embarrassing than a 5'9" woman meeting a 5'11" man, and being significantly taller than he is. (I don't actually know how much that happens. I do recall a friend in high school where I grew three inches every time I visited her house, because her father was officially 5'9", and while I was 5'7" everyplace else, I was an inch taller than him.)"
put off as in no intial messages, or not getting responses?
I do not prefer shorter women, or unprefer taller, but i never message girls who are taller than me, because reply rates aren't good to begin with, so it really isn't worth my time.
159: fat maps weirdly onto masculinity. Among bears (I swear I am not bear-identified. I just...know this stuff) fat would be seen as fairly central to performing masculinity, though no self-respecting bear would say so in those terms--big words are not masculine.
182:
i agree with this. big=push people around.
men wear baggy clothes to look bigger.
I think 181.last is a big factor. There are enough women who really, really want a guy who won't be looking up their nostrils if they wears heels that the response rate will always be better with women who are shorter.
181: As in showing up after an exchange of emails including mentioning her height, and having her date comment on how tall she was. But I don't remember the story exactly.
184: I think a lot of this comes down to which person's unusually short/tall. If you're a man who's 5'4", you're probably going to have better odds with a woman who's 5'2" than one who's 5'5", because the latter doesn't run into men shorter than she is all that often. If you're a man who's 5'9", on the other hand, a six foot woman is probably perfectly open to the idea of dating shorter because not doing so would constrain her options.
I would leap to Blume's defense
Really your most effective option.
i just now realized 182 is about humans.
186.2 constraining your dating options is pretty common, though.
Constrain her dating options pretty severely.
I'm just saying that really tall women I know don't, IME, hold out for only really tall men. The really tall women I know may not be a sociologically valid sample, though.
190.last: How would the social sciences have gotten to where they are today if everyone had that attitude?
I am so in Camp Fuck All That Shit. I would also like to complain about medical bills. We just got one especially taciturn one for a bunch of different bits of bloodwork Snark got done at a recent physical. You have the name of the test, a mysterious negative figure for "insurance adjustment/payment" (nice that the two are not broken out separately), and then a positive figure that is the remainder.
The amount being billed all looks way too high to me, but since I can't tell where the second column numbers came from, I can't tell what's going on at all. Is the new doctor, who is in network, using an out of network lab or something? Do we have a new deductible that hasn't been met yet this year, so we're paying everything except the insurance's negotiated adjustment? Who can say?
Sorry to be so behind the times with my relative on-topicness, there.
As a shortish (5'3") woman, I have to say that I enjoy being married to a guy who is pretty close to my height because it makes for better cuddling, and the fit IYKWIMAITYD is better. I've dated folks up to a foot taller, though, of both the skinny and stocky variety, and for the most part it worked out just fine.
Oh, and a question: any advice for someone about to join a TIAA-CREF (or whatever) type of system?
JennyRobot, the only thing unique about TIAA-CREF is the TIAA Traditional fund that is not like a mutual fund but instead operates a bit like a hedge fund (you can't easily take money out) but also guarantees a minimum return. Otherwise, you have your usual set of mutual funds.
192: redfox, you should receive an Explanation of Benefits (EOB) form from the insurance company spelling out more clearly the doctor's original charge, the adjustment (disallowed) amount, the payment they made to the doctor's office, the amount of the remainder applied to your deductible, and the eventual patient's responsibility. Maybe also a running tally for the year of how much of your deductible you've met to date.
But maybe you know this. My primary care physician's office is comically unclear with its billing, too; I make it a rule of thumb not to pay any medical bill until I've received an EOB and compared the figures. Sometimes I wind up taking issue with the doctor's bill based on the EOB, and they invariably reconsider: the EOB has the final say.
France and Japan have perfectly adequate national savings schemes, albeit that the French one is also a twisty maze of tax incentives, like the US.
Always join a good teachers' retirement system in North America, if the option is there. They are big and typically very well-managed ones and they usually pay the right salaries to attract the right people; you will be getting a much better class of fund manager than you would get otherwise.
Half the things you are complaining about are tax innovations, not financial innovations. The financial industry could live perfectly well with nice simple tax-efficient savings vehicles - in fact it would love them because the takeup would be huge, as it was with the PEP in the UK. However, as the PEP episode demonstrates, a simple and well-designed tax efficient savings vehicle blows out all the revenue calculations and leaves the taxman with an embarrassing shortfall. This is, totally, built into the plan.
The capital markets don't allocate capital. They teach you that at business school but it's not true. It's a function of the market that's close to nugatory in terms of economic relevance. What the capital markets do, is that they provide a market for capital (the clue is in the name). By matching buy and sell orders, they make it possible for long-dated industrial projects to be financed out of liquid savings. This is a service that rich people are prepared to pay a lot of money for.
In general, your problems are vastly more likely to be a result of income and wealth inequality per se than of any of the natural financial industry consequences of income and wealth inequality. You may notice, for example, that TARP has been repaid at a profit, and yet this has not materially reduced the pressure to cut social programs, or the mithering of people who believe the USA to have a debt problem.
I should add: sometimes the EOB shows the insurance refused to cover something it should have, which usually turns out to be because the doctor's office billed for that charge under the wrong code. The doc's office then resubmits the claim with the proper code to the insurance company -- 'cause I ain't paying it as is, man -- and a new/revised EOB is generated.
Fun!
The capital markets don't allocate capital. They teach you that at business school but it's not true. It's a function of the market that's close to nugatory in terms of economic relevance. What the capital markets do, is that they provide a market for capital (the clue is in the name). By matching buy and sell orders, they make it possible for long-dated industrial projects to be financed out of liquid savings.
Maybe I'm dense, but I don't see the difference between allocating capital and making it possible for long-dated industrial projects to be financed out of liquid savings. Isn't that just allocating capital to particular projects?
I had an FSA at WF which I really needed, because you had to spend $550 on medicine before any insurance coverage kicked in. I had a debit card, and if i hadn't it, a prescription would have automatically deposited the money in my checking account.
I never got asked about the receipts. In fact, they actually paid a billed charge automatically for $250 for mental health which was completely uncovered--thus no negotiated rate--that was written off by the hospital as free care (then paid by the state. The hospital wasn't allowed to bill me, because my income was too low.
I set it up to require the debit card after that. I was going to send the money back so that I could spend it on other medical expenses, but I never did. Nobody ever asked for a receipt. The easy way to spend down an FSA was to buy a lot of contact lens solution, but you can't do that anymore.
So what's up with these changes in FSA allowable expenses? Shouldn't Big Eyeglasses have killed that in committee?
#200: Allocating capital to particular projects is exactly what the market doesn't do, to any economically meaningful extent. Investment projects are financed out of retained earnings for the most part, and the supervision of "the markets" over capital issuance is pretty minimal.
What it does is creates the conditions under which the bourgeois class is prepared to invest in corporate enterprise at all. Joan Robinson was correct in saying that the true purpose of the capital market was the provision of "a convenience for rentiers", but I think underestimated the importance of that "convenience" - without liquidity, rentiers would be much more likely to hoard specie or land.
Basically, if you've got some money and want some securities, the "capital market" will sell you some securities. If you've got some securities and want some money, they'll buy your securities. That's about as much as it's reasonable to expect from the capital market, and it's actually a jolly convenient way to organise things when you compare it to the alternatives.
Is there an appreciable difference between an FSA and an HSA (health savings account)? I'm afraid I didn't do much independent research on the matter, but just went with my health insurance broker's advice, which was a very firm, "You don't want an FSA." I'm sure I scribbled some notes as to why at the time, and now, recently, have set up an HSA.
Shorter me: I too hate this shit.
203: We could work up a truly hilarious transatlantic double-talk routine about this whole capital allocation question, couldn't we?
Let's see if I've got this straight: Mr. Xyz is an inventor, who invents a new type of widget. He finds some venture capital, hires some people, starts making widgets. Things are going well, so he and the other owners of the corporation decide that it's time to expand and make even more of these neo-widgets. So Mr. Xyz and his other backers go to an investment bank, explain about the widgets, and the investment bank forms a syndicate to sell shares of XYZ Corp. through an initial public offering. They clear all the regulatory hurdles, the members of the syndicate are allocated a certain amount of shares (not including the shares reserved for the company officers, board of directors, and previous investors) and then the members of the syndicate market those shares to their clients. If there is demand for shares in a company making neo-widgets, the IPO price can be set relatively high. If not, it will be set lower, or it will fail completely. If the IPO is a success, XYZ Corp. can make more neo-widgets, if it is less successful, they can't. How does that not amount to the primary capital market allocating capital?
My hospital charges a separate facilities fee. I haven't had to pay anything other than my co-pay. I read somewhere that patients who see primary care providers at practices affiliated with the Cleveland Clinic are paying their co-pays and then getting billed $100 or so for the facilities fee. One woman left her PCP of many years over it.
Someone told me that Germany regulates its finance sector with the intent of keeping it at a less "sophisticated" level.
Likely pwned, but only 1/3 through the thread, and I'm tired.
My roommate--25, graduate student, with a job as a waitress--cannot get a credit card here. She just can't. Germany is definitely different w.r.t consumer credit.
OTOH, it's not necessarily a better model when the German banks refuse to extend credit to local debtors, whom they could perhaps gather real knowledge about, and instead speculate in housing in the Euro-periphery.
203 -- makes sense, thanks. I never could reconcile the version of "the capital markets allocate capital" taught in law school (i.e., the place where bad Chicago-esque business school economics goes to die) with anything resembling apparent commercial reality.
204: You build up an HSA as a high as you want it and don't have to spend the money in any given year. The catch is that your health plan has to be a high-detuctible one. The idea is that you can save money to pay your $500 physical and build up enough money to pay your $5K deductible. It's very efficient savings for rich, healthy people. At a certain age you can take out the income for non-medical expenses, and the tax rate is lower than the normal marginal rate for high-income people.
210: Okay, that was roughly my sense of the difference: unspent funds in an HSA roll over into the next year (there are some limits, on which I'm unclear as yet), while FSA funds are a use-it-or-lose-it arrangement.
I have a medium high-deductible ($1200) health insurance plan with which I'm permitted to have an HSA. I'm not sure why an HSA is optimal just if you're rich and healthy; I'm neither.
Oh, and re: 162, some of it could be posture, too. I seem to remember JM doing that whole 'actually standing up straight' thing.
47
So you appreciate a bunch of innovations that are all at least a hundred years old?
More recent innovations are credit cards, online banking, index funds and the elimination of stock certificates. Also fees are lower in many cases.
195
Oh, and a question: any advice for someone about to join a TIAA-CREF (or whatever) type of system?
Do you have a choice? I had a choice between TIAA and Vanguard plans and Vanguard seemed better to me. TIAA had a big captive customer base for a long time and may have become fat and lazy as a result. Perhaps they have improved recently in response to complaints.
The conversation has moved on--to useful things for me! since I have finally acquired health insurance (yay me)--but I wanted to respond to LB's "You're 5'9" or so?" in 166. No, I'm actually 5'7.5", almost exactly your height. See, it's deceptive.
Anyway, I just got a little card in the mail informing me that if I did not opt in, my insurance would assume that I did not want to receive paper Explanations of Benefits. From the sound of it, an actual paper record might come in handy for waving around. Maybe I'll opt in after all.
211:
There are two reasons that they benefit the rich more than the poor.
First, If you're rich the tax deductibility is worth more, because your marginal tax rate is lower.
Second, After age 65 you can withdraw the money and spend it on non-medical expenses. You have to pay income taxes, but not the 20% penalty, and your money has grown tax deferred. It's liek an extra IRA. So, if you didn't need to spend much on medical expenses then you were able to save it all up. And/or, if you're rich you can just spend other income on the medical expenses.
215: Definitely opt in for the paper EOBs. The health care service provider (doctor, hospital, lab, whatever) receives a provider version of an EOB themselves from the insurance company, and if they try to insist that their EOB backs up the bill they've sent you, having your own copy to wave around does wonders.
It also just helps to match up bills received to an EOB before you pay. I do that as a matter of course.
That makes a good deal of sense. I'll opt into the paper EOB immediately.
211: I didn't realize there was a 20% penalty for withdrawing excess funds from the HSA (before age 65). Clearly I have to look into this in more depth. Which I knew.
211:I'm not sure why an HSA is optimal just if you're rich and healthy; I'm neither.
As BG says, it's like an extra IRA (except better in some ways). If you have a lot of money to throw around (such that you can afford to take losses on that money and you can afford to be forgo being able to get to it over the longer term), getting tax deferment for some of the money is a good deal. If you don't have a lot of money to throw around, or if you have to spend the money on health care, it may or may not be a good deal. It depends on the plan - that is, where the money gets stuck.
In your case, if the money just goes into a bank account and your taxable income is thus reduced and you're just going to spend the money on medical care each and every year, it's probably a good deal. If the money winds up in some mutual fund with early withdrawal penalties (and given the state of regulatory play, I wouldn't rule it out) or some such nonsense, then it wouldn't be a good deal. (And I hear noise about paying for regular medications being a problem, so I would check that carefully.)
205: If there is demand for shares in a company making neo-widgets, the IPO price can be set relatively high. If not, it will be set lower, or it will fail completely. If the IPO is a success, XYZ Corp. can make more neo-widgets, if it is less successful, they can't. How does that not amount to the primary capital market allocating capital?
The market isn't allocating capital: individual investors are, for good or ill. (Although, to be fair, the amount of money available is going to depend on the state of the market - a fat and happy market will spew gobs of money over anything with a dollar sign after it. But that's not exactly the market allocating capital, is it? Not in the globalized EMH sense, anyways.)
max
['Oh, the fun you'll have.']
218: Immediately! Obviously (presumably) you can access your EOBs electronically, but I'm lazy enough that I might not routinely do that, and it's somewhat interesting to see the codes that the various charges were billed as, and why that service, coded that way, was disallowed.
The most amusing -- in retrospect -- screw-up I worked through was when I nearly drowned some 6 years ago, and was charged full price for the ambulance to the hospital plus the emergency room. This was, according to the codes, because this was a hospital admission I was required to get pre-approval for. But I was unconscious! This has not been billed to insurance properly. We eventually ironed it out, but man: funny people.
221: Further, sometimes you're only allowed access to electronic records going back so far. I can't look at all of my BofA stuff, so if it's important, I'd need to print it. I'm keeping the paper for now.
Same deal with check images, but they charge for paper, so I don't get the paper images.
220: In your case, if the money just goes into a bank account and your taxable income is thus reduced and you're just going to spend the money on medical care each and every year, it's probably a good deal.
Thanks, babe. That had been my thinking. I will check on the rest of the potential problems with this thing. And, hi.
I want to go back to the subject of couples' hight, because I just learned this fun fact: Karima "Ruby Heartthrob" El Mahroug: 6'. Silvio Berlusconi: 5'5"
your money has grown tax deferred. It's liek an extra IRA.
Like an extra IRA that you're only allowed to invest in a checking account that pays about 0.05% interest. I'm skeptical that this is an efficient vehicle for long-term savings, and I'd be surprised to learn that many people were attempting to use it as such. The relatively low annual contribution limit also seems like it would make it just basically not worth the effort for a wealthy person to use this as a savings vehicle.
I'm 6' and Roberta's 5'9"-5'10". I've dated a range from 4'11" to 6'1" and, honestly, I couldn't come up with a preference.
I make it a rule of thumb not to pay any medical bill until I've received an EOB and compared the figures. Sometimes I wind up taking issue with the doctor's bill based on the EOB
You sound like you're good at this; I can't stand it. And what's most frustrating is how lopsided it is--if I don't pay close enough attention, I get screwed (the mistakes are never--never--in my favor), and if I do spend my saturday nights combing through these goddamn benefit statements to find the errors the dr. or the insurance company made, and then spend half a weekday on the phone with both of them trying to get it sorted out, the payoff is that I'm left exactly where I should have been if they hadn't screwed up in the first place, with no compensation for my time or aggravation. In my ideal world there would be treble damages automatically applied to any mistake like this, and prison time for any mistake the party at fault couldn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt was inadvertent.
Lee and I have about an inch of height difference. I like that it sometimes has bothered her that I'm marginally taller (though not that I'm now heavier) but I've never cared either way.
My longest relationship was with a woman who was fourteen inches shorter than me. Other than 69, not much of an issue.
I believe Mme. Sarkozy is rather taller* than M.
* And, of course, more attractive in every dimension.
Is there a particular leggy supermodel that Putin is associated with? We could start a fan page for right-wing midgets and their giant girlfriends.
Except she's only 5'5" and 110 lb, so.
However, I've been told it isn't the length of one's legs that counts, but what you can do with them.
In 232, I'm sure the hands belong to the guy on the right, but it's so much more fun to imagine they belong to Putin.
Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich pretty much define "out of his league." I assume he has mad sexin' skillz, which is important in a presidential candidate.
* And, of course, more attractive in every dimension.
Except the dimension that measures one's willingness to marry a slimy bastard.
236: Agreed. It emphasizes the Dobby/Hagrid thing they've got going.
How does that not amount to the primary capital market allocating capital?
In principle yes you're right, but in practice:
a) primary issues like this are pretty small compared to the overall run of activity (these days; in the dot com boom there was a lot of capital allocation going on, by which I foreshadow point c) below).
b) primary and secondary issuance is typically significantly outweighed by share buybacks, which represent a *corporate* decision to allocate capital *away* from the market - the stock market is typically a use of funds, not a source of funds, for the corporate sector as a whole in modern AngloSaxon economies.
c) if you'd ever been involved in doing the pricing and structuring of one of these deals, you'd be a bit cynical about the extent to which "allocating capital" means anything other than "taking the orders when they come in", or the degree of gatekeepership involved.
OT: Why have we not seen a progressive counterproposal to the Ryan plan from one of our Congressmen (if we have any)? Or do they just vanish without any discussion?
What sort of thing were you thinking of? Progressive, at the moment, would involve saying "Screw the deficit, we can borrow money cheaply now, let's get our infrastructure in shape and get people back to work whatever it costs, and grow our way out of any fiscal problems." I haven't seen anyone being forthright about that lately, I admit.
So what's up with these changes in FSA allowable expenses? Shouldn't Big Eyeglasses have killed that in committee?
Big Eyeglasses has a different business model.
242: Something dealing with at least part of the long term deficits with tax increases and defense spending, but even typing that got me depressed about how it would be treated by the media relative to the Ryan plan.
Guys, it's not the height differential per se that matters, it's the attractiveness differential.
243: From the very next comment by John Emerson:
It's also possible that brain cancer causes cell phone use.
Hah!
227 live update!: I've spent half the day today on the phone with these fuckers, about a hospital bill I wasn't supposed to get (since it was a routine screening), which the hospital says they were just following the coding provided by the Dr., and they can't help me at all and I have to call the Dr. But the Dr.'s bill was paid in full by the insurance, so seems to be correct. And the Dr. says there's nothing they can do and that I should call my insurance. And the insurance says it appears the hospital must have inadvertantly transposed two numbers in the coding (since there were two numbers transposed from the codes the insurance recieved from the Dr.), so instead of a routine screening the hospital's coding shows that I was recieving a colonoscopy as treatment for asthma. But of course the insurance can't do anything to help, because they have to just use whatever codes are provided to them. So I have to call back the hospital (every one of these calls involves infuriating computer-assisted keypad bullshit, of course) only to be told that they'll try to look into it and get back to me, and that I should pay the bill in the meantime so it doesn't become overdue (I actually laughed at that). In my opinion every one of these people should be locked in a room and lit on fire until they're able to sort this out amongst themselves (which shouldn't take long). I don't know why I should have to be involved in any of it. I hate it, and I swear something just like this happens on probably 1/5 of all the medical claims I have, with each involving a half-day of this bullshit.
That's what drives me insane -- the inability to figure out who is in a position to straighten out the error.
One presumes that's deliberate, as it increases the chance you'll give up and go away.
I have been living 247 since Hokey Pokey was born. Every. Single. Week there is another expense which eventually I'm not responsible for, but I have to go around in circles until someone figures out what's going on. Fortunately my doc has someone who has helped me tremendously navigate the system.
One infuriating detail was when I got charged for having an out-of-network anaesthesiologist administer the epidural. Oh, gee, could I check your insurance while being throttled by contractions? Oopsie, I'll have to request an in-network anaesthesiologist. Kthnx!
Is this "Make Our Blood Pressure Rise" day on Unfogged?
When I changed jobs a while back I went from the federal employees' BCBS plan to a private-employer BCBS plan. After a while I noticed that the EOBs I was getting still talked about the federal plan, and I started making calls to see what I could do to straighten that out -- not because my benefits had improved, mind you, solely to try to minimize the headache that was sure to follow. It seriously took *months* of phone calls to get the FEHB people to terminate my old, no-longer-eligible-for-it insurance.
By the time they did it had been well over a year, and the FEHB plan had paid for lots of stuff that had happened after my official date of disenrollment. There followed several more months of Notices of Overpayment coming in, one at a time, for each prescription that we'd filled in that dead period. And only I could call up the pharmacy or the doctor or whoever and get them to resubmit to the new BCBS plan, one Notice at a time, so that I would only have to pay the $4 difference in copays instead of the full amount.
And nobody at any doctor's office was able to help me with this even after I started pointing out to them before an appointment that they'd been billing the wrong insurance. I don't understand why, but maybe when they tried to bill the new BCBS plan it automatically bounced over to the old one since I hadn't yet been disenrolled from one and enrolled in the other?
What a hassle. And this was a) relatively small potatoes moneywise, and b) during a time when my job involved dealing with this kind of crap for other people. It's hard to imagine what it'd be like to go through the much more common scenario where you don't find out until the amount is ruinous and you have no idea how the system works.
w/r/t medical billing, my policy is just to ignore 100% of bills until I get a stern letter from the insurance company with a final amount or something warning me that things are about to go to collections. It saves me a lot of anxiety, but isn't great for budgeting.
243: I still don't understand. How can preventing the use of FSAs for a lot of vision care needs be beneficial in any way to Luxxotica? When my parents contributed to FSAs, and later when I did, the annual trip to the optometrist's to spend remaining money on eyewear was a big highlight. It's how I got my first pair of prescription sunglasses.
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Big rite of passage today: First time checking a friend into Hazelden. Went pretty well. Did not get to eat any of the famously fancy food.
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247: Wow, my sympathies, urple. It sounds like it's on the hospital to make it right by correcting their coding. My only suggestion, helpful or not, is that the next time you talk to the hospital's billing department (after going through the obnoxious computer-assisted telephone message system), you ask whomever you've just spent 15 minutes explaining the whole thing to (again) if you can talk to him/her *directly* for follow-up, so you have an ally at the hospital who's familiar with the case and understands that they billed insurance incorrectly and the ball's in their court to resubmit their claim.
And I'd switch tasks any time in handling health insurance bullshit in exchange for someone figuring out what I should do financially and retirement-wise, since I'm a helpless idiot there.
It would appear that there are different flavors of incomprehensible bullshit.
242
... we can borrow money cheaply now, ...
Just because you can borrow money cheaply (in the short term) doesn't mean you should. Most of the Democratic spending proposals are idiotic. A better idea would be a carbon tax.
258: People are partly made of carbon.
Which is why it should be pricey to burn them.
The last few tests my doctor has wanted, i've done on my own (mailorder).
the hospital's coding shows that I was recieving a colonoscopy as treatment for asthma
well, it certainly caused a sharp intake of breath.
263 led me to visualize Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet) muttering obscenities into his oxygen mask as he gets a colonoscopy.
DON'T YOU FUCKING LOOK AT MY COLON!
Yes, yelling rather than muttering I realized after I posted, neighbor.
