[TheRealThing]

Yea, because your last three post do nothing but blame Bush. Just as I said in another post, wait for it, and there it will be. Please be original, thank of something instead of what your spoon fed at breakfast by your liberal masters pulling the strings on your puppet arms.

As for the 401K, I would hope every working American would be smart enough to and understand how it works, but its not going to make a difference when it goes right back down. My father lost 119,000 of his 401K since 2008. What does that say about the run of this administration? You 1%ers are killing me.
My retirement is fine. I contribute 15% of my check weekly in a T Rowe Price fund. Its not going to matter though, by the time my target date of 2045 comes along, it wont be enough and ill have to work until I die, unless we elect someone with enough sense to run a country. Good luck with that one.

The fed is keeping the market inflated with freshly printed money. Kind of like an air pump that can keep an inner tube inflated even though it has a big hole in it. The market used to stand on it's own due to the natural workings of the free enterprise system on which it is based. The Ronald Reagan era chief economist Art Laffer's model of the 1980's was the last time the free enterprise system was allowed to work. Keynesian economics on the other hand, is based on governmental manipulation of the market, ergo the term quantitative easing. The point is, as you pointed out, that inner tube and the market will go right back down just as soon as the pump is disconnected.

That's the exact reason why the job picture counter acts with the growing market. People keep trading and investing because Bernanke has been propping the market up, ala the classic Keynesian model of governmental manipulation. Believe me, the Wall Street elite wake up every day wondering if that will be the day of the next great market adjustment. They hang on every word the fed issues.

Hence, we have a Workforce Participation Rate stalled at 62.8% which, is the lowest in the 3 1/2 decades since 1978, during the miserable days of the Jimmy Carter Presidency. If one were to take today's manipulative machinations of the federal reserve out of the equation, we would all understand the term coined in that era and which became the hallmark of the sluggish and depressed Jimmy Carter economy. 'The Misery Index.'
EXCERPT---
Reviving the Misery Index

"Graybeards will remember Jimmy Carter’s embrace of the “Misery Index”—the combination of the inflation rate and the unemployment rate—that Peanut Brain used against Gerald Ford in 1976, but which he then doubled during his forlorn presidency as Ronald Reagan skillfully reminded everyone in 1980. Well, it’s baaaack.

Only this time in a much more refined and useable way, as economist Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins University explains in a terrific column in the Indonesia-based Globe Asia magazine. (The Cato Institute, where Hanke is a fellow, has cross-posted a full version of the article.) Here’s a few excerpts, though the real action can be seen in some of the charts and tables Hanke and Globe Asia have put together:"
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/20...-index.php

There are black clouds on the horizon portending the day when pensions and 401K's might collapse, and they are more than ominous. Some think there is an adjustment coming that will end American opulence in the world economic arena. At any rate, the dreams and life styles of those upon whose backs this nation was built, will certainly be dashed. Art Laffer is still lurking about, ready and able to assist but then, liberals would see this nation laying on history's ash heap long before they would submit themselves to him, even though history proves he bats a thousand, and they have yet to get to 1st.