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Health care, yes. A 401k is your money and goes with you if you leave, it's the older pension model that has issues with people jumping around.

dehrmann 2y ago
The other issue with pensions is they're run and funded by the company. Some benefits are guaranteed, some aren't. It's also a distraction for the company. Their expertise is in making widgets, not running pensions. Plus it opens the door for funding shenanigans and liability (GE comes to mind). This always should have been outsourced to private pension managers or possibly governments.
vinyl7 2y ago
I think the model of staying at a single employer for your whole career then getting a pension is a better model than our current layoff and job hopping every 2-years just to keep up with inflation. Special knowledge of the product is lost, and it takes a lot of time to get up to speed on a new product. Then again, most modern products are throw away garbage that barely lasts two years anyway.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  What is you make a poor choice of job early in your career? What if your chosen employer runs into bad economic conditions and needs to shrink itself to match? What if something comes up with family and you need to move to a different state? . The 401k model is much less fragile if life goes less then perfectly.
  - vinyl7 2y ago
    The difference is sustainability. The current business model is maximizing profits for the shareholders over the next quarter, which will alway result in killing a product in search of higher profits or laying off to make sure net income is higher. In the other model, businesses focus on long term sustainability and consistent income over infinite growth. The infinite growth model breeds a graph like looks like a massive upword trend followed by an almost equal crash as things top out. You can either have a hill with an and up and down, or you can have a consistent much smaller and more constant incline.
nine_zeros 2y ago
> A 401k is your money and goes with you if you leave, it's the older pension model that has issues with people jumping around. I mean, IRA limits should match 401k limits instead of keeping 23k limit only for employer-sponsored accounts. There is zero reason an independent person should have to rely on fickle corporations for that limit.

dehrmann 2y ago

The other issue with pensions is they're run and funded by the company. Some benefits are guaranteed, some aren't. It's also a distraction for the company. Their expertise is in making widgets, not running pensions. Plus it opens the door for funding shenanigans and liability (GE comes to mind). This always should have been outsourced to private pension managers or possibly governments.

vinyl7 2y ago

I think the model of staying at a single employer for your whole career then getting a pension is a better model than our current layoff and job hopping every 2-years just to keep up with inflation. Special knowledge of the product is lost, and it takes a lot of time to get up to speed on a new product. Then again, most modern products are throw away garbage that barely lasts two years anyway.

tbrownaw 2y ago
What is you make a poor choice of job early in your career? What if your chosen employer runs into bad economic conditions and needs to shrink itself to match? What if something comes up with family and you need to move to a different state? . The 401k model is much less fragile if life goes less then perfectly.
- vinyl7 2y ago
  The difference is sustainability. The current business model is maximizing profits for the shareholders over the next quarter, which will alway result in killing a product in search of higher profits or laying off to make sure net income is higher. In the other model, businesses focus on long term sustainability and consistent income over infinite growth. The infinite growth model breeds a graph like looks like a massive upword trend followed by an almost equal crash as things top out. You can either have a hill with an and up and down, or you can have a consistent much smaller and more constant incline.

nine_zeros 2y ago

> A 401k is your money and goes with you if you leave, it's the older pension model that has issues with people jumping around. I mean, IRA limits should match 401k limits instead of keeping 23k limit only for employer-sponsored accounts. There is zero reason an independent person should have to rely on fickle corporations for that limit.