It’s Your Future
Massive Cuts to Social Security Are Coming and Should Worry Us All
By Brett Arends, MarketWatch
The mother of all political battles is coming, and it’s about a wall. No, not that one. It’s another, much bigger wall. One that fewer people are talking about — so far. It’s the wall that Social Security is due to run into in just 15 years. That’s when, say Social Security’s trustees, the program’s trust fund is scheduled to run out of money. If nothing else is done, they say, after 2034 Social Security’s annual income will only be enough to pay “about three-quarters of scheduled benefits.” We’re talking about a 25% cut in payments. How big a deal [...]
The Man Who Called the 2008 Financial Crisis Says the Stock Market
Will ‘Break a Lot of Hearts’ in the Next 20 Years
By Mark DeCambre, MarketWatch
Jeremy Grantham, the acclaimed investor credited with predicting the 2000 and 2008 downturns, says that investors should get inured to lackluster returns in the stock market for the next two decades, after a century of handsome gains. “In the last 100 years, we’re used to delivering perhaps 6%,” but the U.S. market will be delivering real returns of about 2% or 3% on average over the next 20 years, the value investor and co-founder of Boston-based asset manager GMO told CNBC in a rare interview. Over the past five years, the S&P 500 index has produced a compound annual growth rate of [...]
Two-Income Couples Are Surprisingly Unprepared for Retirement
By Alicia Munnell, MarketWatch
Every time we look at households’ preparedness for retirement, we find that two-earner couples are in the worst shape. We generally attribute their status to the fact that one-earner couples receive a Social Security spouse’s benefit equal to 50% of the breadwinner’s while most two-earner couples do not. A recent study, however, suggests another problem: two-earner couples often do not save enough through their 401(k) plans. Since two-earner households generally earn more than one-earner households, they need more savings. But only about half of private sector workers have a workplace retirement plan at any given time, and people rarely save [...]
America’s Elderly Are Twice as Likely to Work Now Than in 1985
By Suzanne Woolley
Just as single-income families began to vanish in the last century, many of America’s elderly are now forgoing retirement for the same reason: They don’t have enough money. Rickety social safety nets, inadequate retirement savings plans and sky high health-care costs are all conspiring to make the concept of leaving the workforce something to be more feared than desired. For the first time in 57 years, the participation rate in the labor force of retirement-age workers has cracked the 20 percent mark, according to a new report from money manager United Income (PDF). As of February, the ranks of people age 65 [...]
7 American Cities That Could Disappear by 2100
By Aria Bendix
No city is immune to the effects of a warming world, but a few are more vulnerable than the rest. As sea levels continue to rise, low-lying coastal cities can expect more devastating floods that ruin buildings, destroy infrastructure, and claim lives. By conservative estimates, cities around the world could witness more than 6 feet of flooding by the year 2100. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has predicted that sea levels could rise by 10 to 12 feet if global emissions continue unabated. But these numbers are averages, which means some areas would see higher levels, while others would be less affected. Under [...]
Adult Children Are Costing Many Parents Their Retirement Savings
By Megan Cerullo
Financial independence, once a hallmark of adulthood, has gone by the wayside as adult children increasingly depend on their parents to help them cover the cost of rent, student loans, health insurance and more. But parents' desire to give their children a financial assist could be misguided — and even backfire in the long run. Half of American parents are unable to save as much as they'd like to for retirement, and their grown offspring — whom they still count as dependents — are to blame, according to a new Bankrate.com survey. While they likely mean well, parents who [...]
This may be the worst thing to come from Trump’s presidency
By David Gergen and James Piltch
In the midst of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt had the foresight to see that advancements in American science were critical to Allied victories in World War II. Searching for day-to-day guidance, he named Vannevar Bush, an engineer with a joint Ph.D from MIT and Harvard, as the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Bush became a quiet hero in the war effort, serving essentially as the first national science adviser to a president, providing critical oversight of the Manhattan Project—the WWII research effort that produced the atomic bomb-- and eventually helping to create the [...]
Climate Change’s Deadliest Effects Are Unfolding under the Sea
By Molly Enking
Think of the dangers climate change poses to animals, and you’ll likely picture skinny polar bears or cliff-diving walruses (collective sob). But it turns out that our overheating planet is actually wreaking the most havoc on creatures out of our sight: marine life. Sea animals like crabs, lobster, and fish are dying off at twice the rate of land animals, according to a study published in Nature on Wednesday. The researchers looked at more than 400 cold-blooded animals on land and sea, including lizards, dragonflies, lobsters, and mussels. They found that creatures that people rely on for food (fish, mollusks, shellfish) are [...]
A Warming Arctic Could Cost The World Trillions of Dollars
By Stephen Leahy
SCIENTISTS HAVE LONG warned that climate change is likely to bring expensive impacts, from rising seas to stronger storms. And a new study comes with a hefty price tag. A warming Arctic is shifting from white to dark as sea ice melts and land-covered snow retreats, and that means it can absorb even more of the sun’s heat. Plus, the Arctic’s vast permafrost area is thawing, releasing more heat-trapping carbon and methane. These climate-change-driven feedbacks in the Arctic are accelerating warming even faster and may add nearly $70 trillion to the overall costs of climate change—even if the world meets [...]
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/05/14/it-was-degrees-near-arctic-ocean-this-weekend-carbon-dioxide-hit-its-highest-level-human-history/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4bfdaf12e776It was 84 degrees near the Arctic Ocean this weekend as carbon dioxide hit its highest level in human history
By Jason Samenow
It was 84 degrees near the Arctic Ocean this weekend as carbon dioxide hit its highest level in human history
By Jason Samenow
Over the weekend, the climate system sounded simultaneous alarms. Near the entrance to the Arctic Ocean in northwest Russia, the temperature surged to 84 degrees Fahrenheit (29 Celsius). Meanwhile, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eclipsed 415 parts per million for the first time in human history. By themselves, these are just data points. But taken together with so many indicators of an altered atmosphere and rising temperatures, they blend into the unmistakable portrait of human-induced climate change. Saturday’s steamy 84-degree reading was posted in Arkhangelsk, Russia, where the average high temperature is around 54 this [...]
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