401k

9 Pages 2327 Words

1930’s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the oval office. He was elected president of the United States in November of 1932. By March of the following year there were over thirteen million people that had no jobs, and almost every single bank as far as the eye could see was closed. President Roosevelt proposed a new and innovative program to bring recovery to business and to agriculture and relief to those who were in fear of losing their farms and homes to poverty from unemployment. In 1935, recovery was slow to come and the American public at large was turning against Roosevelt’s New Deal program. This led the President to a come up with a new program of reform, which we know today as social security. It pushed heavier taxes on the wealthy, along with a new way of controlling banks and public utilities, along with a huge work relief program for those people who were unemployed. Social Security has been around for almost three quarters of a century now, but nowadays younger people under the age of sixty-five believe that it will go bankrupt sometime before they retire and most of them don’t think they will be able to save enough cash on their own. “According to a new CNN/TIME poll only thirty-one percent believe that the system is currently in a state of crisis; the majority just feels that there are problems but not a crisis.” (http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/04/10/polls/social.security/) The way in which any individual will feel about Social security will usually be dependant upon the age of the person in question. People over fifty tend to think the system is fair; while there will always be others who feel that it’s not. In the Industrial Age, a Defined Benefit pension plan meant that the company guaranteed you, the worker, and a defined amount of money for as long as you lived. This made people feel secure because these plans assured a steady income.
Modern employer sponsored retirement programs such as 401(k) p...