Thus, it is no  surprise then that millennials are getting an early start on retirement saving, according to USA Today.  The reasons?  First, they have watched their baby boomer parents struggle to prepare for retirement.  Indeed, many of the boomer parents who are heavily mortgaged are finding themselves working longer than they originally planned.  Second, this age group is not relying heavily on the solvency of Social Security.  In fact, less than half of those surveyed plan on relying on public programs for retirement income.

For the majority of lawmakers in Congress who are politically  indebted to the AARP, they should listen to this younger generation.  If ever there is a time for Social Security reform, it is now.  Why not start the transition of allowing young workers to invest some of their payroll taxes into personal accounts? It is no longer a “fringe” idea, and it gives me hope that the younger generation realistically understand the limits of government entitlements.

The British Journal of Psychiatry results were interesting but marginally confusing.  The VA Operations and Research Department allowed the Brits access to the service records of 100 Vietnam veterans claiming PTSD.  Their findings were astounding.  Of those 100 veterans who were still receiving treatment in the early ‘90s, only 41 percent actually had combat exposure and only 7 percent received medals for valor.  The other 53 percent claiming PTSD had never experienced combat and 6 percent were never deployed at all.

Those who malinger on the Social Security Disability program are shaming those who are truly in pain and allowing taxpayers to foot the bill.  I understand a certain amount of political risk is associated with second guessing veterans, but recent Congressional Research Service and RAND studies found that anywhere between 1 percent and 60 percent of returning OIF/OEF service-members could qualify for PTSD because of inconsistencies in the screening process.  This could potentially amount to billions of dollars paid to those who are simply looking to defraud the government to make their life a little easier.

See, this is where you start to disagree…that wee bit of misguided “responsibility to those who served” creeping into your head.  I am all for compensating soldiers. But over the last few years the VA has received a 40 percent budget increase, and a 2,000 percent increase in claim backlogs.  PTSD claims account for only 15 percent of the total, but result in more than 35 percent of entitlement disbursements.

The number of free-riders is telling of our society.  Thank you for your service, but if you don’t have PTSD, get out of the line so someone who is hurting can receive the compensation they deserve.

“Start processing the oldest claims first.”

Since the majority of claims are still processed through paper records, one would think that the  oldest claims would have always been processed first, since they, ostensibly, were filed before newer claims.

In fact, one of the Veterans Benefits Administration’s flagship programs, the Veterans Benefits Management System (VBMS) was developed in 2010 and was scheduled for implementation in 2012.  Unfortunately, despite wide-scale implementation of this software, this system has yet to fully complete even the simplest of disability claims end to end.  Yet taxpayers are shelling out billions for rushed, poorly designed and ineffective schemes.  (More details to come in a soon-to-be-released publication.)

What Hickey’s article inadvertently says is that they have prioritized their new programs in order to drive down the processing times.  Well, it works.  Newer programs like the Integrated Disability Evaluation System, a joint VA-DOD program, have been producing substantially lower waiting times and increased accuracy rates.  But it also means that the VA has essentially been cooking the books.

Hickey gets to take her numbers to Congress, commenting on the efficacy of her initiatives while carefully omitting the fact that not only have they changed how they calculate accuracy rates (see my previous post) but that they’re also prioritizing the new programs.

The truth is that old claims are old, and inaccurate, because they keep getting shuffled to the bottom in order to justify newer initiatives.  These initiatives ultimately end up folding under pressure more than Tony Romo.

While it is meant to level the playing field between brick-and-mortar stores and online stores (by allowing online retailers to collect state sales taxes), it will be nothing more than a bureaucratic nightmare in its current form.  The Market Place Fairness Act would allow online retailers to collect sales taxes for the buyer’s state.  So if I am an online retailer, I would have to keep track of the sales tax rates in some 9,000 taxing jurisdictions and remit payments to those jurisdictions.

As noted in the NCPA publication, “The Pitfalls of Internet Sales Tax Collection,” this destination-based form of taxation would require imperfect software plus several hours of compliance time.  This is not what I call “leveling the playing field,” since a brick-and-mortar store must only keep up with the sales tax of its own location, not 8,999 others.  If there must be an Internet sales tax, an origin-based tax would be much more simple and foster tax competition among states (see publication).

States with no sales tax are hopping mad.  And as well they should be.  Once retailers get their “free” software to collect taxes from other states, the temptation for legislators in these no-tax states to impose sales taxes of their own will be far too great.

So! Here is me on the suicide prevention page of the Department of Veteran Affairs website.  Being a disabled vet myself, I know how

avoidant we can be, and we prefer to see someone face to face rather than use Tele-health.  I’ll just input my zip code here on the right.

And…. Oh no! Page not found?

Well, being the emotionally stable good samaritan that I am, I would like to contact the VA and let them know that they should fix this problem.

And….

“This page can’t be displayed.”

Apparently they can’t help me, and certainly do not want to be notified of the problem.  Try it out for yourself.  Hopefully they’ll get enough hits to actually solve this problem.  But so far, it looks like Obama’s Executive Order 13625, which is designed to “Improve Access to Mental Health Services for Veterans…” is working out about as well as the rest of his VA initiatives.

“Under current rules, some wealthy individuals are able to accumulate…more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.”

I love it when politicians use vague terms such as “some,” “wealthy” and “reasonable.”  It is a way of couching a problem without providing concrete evidence that a problem exists.  Evidently, there are some people out there that just have way too much in retirement savings and we need to stop them before they go out and spend money and stimulate the economy!  No golf, no yachts, no trips, no motorized scooters.  Nope, nope…retirees need to be near destitute, living on the fringes, and relying on Social Security and Medicare to meet their needs.  I’m uncertain what country the administration has been visiting (Cyprus, perhaps?), but in the United States most baby boomers are ill-prepared for retirement.  To impose a limit on the accruals in a tax-deferred account (these are the accruals, mind you, not contributions, which are already limited) is simply a counter-productive solution to the real problem:  People are not saving enough money for retirement.

Suppose in an act of congressional foolhardiness or unchecked presidential executive powers, such a limit are passed. The devil is in the details:

• For the person retiring today that has, say, $3.5 million in a retirement account, what happens to the half a million over the limit?  Does it get confiscated by the IRS or the U.S. Treasury or handed over to the European Central Bank?
• For those who are years away from retirement, is this a set limit or is it adjusted for inflation?  After all it is absolutely plausible that an individual who begins making maximum contributions to a traditional or Roth 401(k) until age 67 could easily accrue more than $3 million in a retirement account. 
• Does this limit pertain to Roth accounts, which are already taxed, or just traditional tax-deferred accounts?

After reading article-after-article about the low savings rate among Americans, it is irresponsible and simply immoral to suggest that Americans should save less or be punished by a government that can’t tighten its purse strings.