Reply #34: Most people don't get any education on how to

[HereSince1628]

invest/trade equities. Consequently, with no education they are destined to make mistakes and become marks for people who know how to exploit those mistakes. Most would act on their lack of knowledge and choose to have others manage them meaning for individuals they get into lower yielding forms of investing.

If no child is meant to be left behind, why are state and federal governmentst have such great concern for "intelligent design" but have no interest in making sure that out citizens know not only the importance of investing for retirement but also how to make decisions about managing their investments?

It would be very interesting to know how many people have any idea about how to rationally approach an expected price of a stock so that they can make a reasonable purchase. I suspect it is an amazingly small percentage. If you can't do that, you have no chance to win more than you lose. I read every week, here on DU, someone talking about how investing is either simple gambling or a rigged game. The nation CAN'T turn to privitization with that level of misunderstanding or most people will quickly lose their money.

I recognize there are many problems with privatizing SS that I'm not addressing and that I'm not speaking to fears/dangers such as dealing with market crises that do happen and which wipe out savings/investments (i.e. the stock market crash &depression, the banking failures of the 80's, huge criminal scams like Enron, and small time scams like one that was alledged a week ago that has the share values of a company named Digital Gas (DIGG)). It also doesn't speak to finding some way of providing for the poor who are forced to live in the present have essentially nothing to put toward retirement. There are a lot of problems.

Baby-boomers were raised on the mantra that SS would not be there for them. As we've seen recently, even company sponsored retirement plans are failing. You might think 100 percent of boomers would have learned by now how to take charge of retirement savings and participate in an investment economy in a manner other than letting someone else take a cut for doing it for them. But, they haven't.

Individuals DO need to have retirement investments that they can control. A wide variety of investment forms are available to encourage and facilitate individuals to do that. But people need to be prepared to do that, or clever folks who are prepared will part them from their money and leave them behind.