The Economy

And Obama was president on 9/11 and during Katrina

 

Netflix's world has been turned upside down as stock plunges 35% - CNN

Not surprising. Factor in everyone else getting into the streaming game, and their libraries and also factor in limited "emotional" ties to Netflix shows (probably doesn't help that they seem to kill shows after two or three years). They probably need to adjust their algorithms because just because I don't watch a show from beginning to end within a month after it drops, doesn't mean I WON'T be watching it. I think they killed some good shows too soon because people figured they were "safe" and they didn't need to binge them as soon as they dropped.

 

I think they pivoted too hard from "expensive Emmy and Oscar bait" to "throw another 50 trashy teen dramas and game shows on the heap!" Yeah, I want the 20 seasons of Criminal Minds on Netflix, but I also want some prestige shows on there too. Queen's Gambit came out in October 2020, but the rest of their shows that got Emmy nods after that pretty much hit one demographic - The Crown, Bridgerton and Queer Eye combined for 42 noms.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/04/20/retirement-ira-inequality-budget/


The American retirement system is built for the rich

"Bipartisan support for Secure 2.0 is part of a decades-long pattern: While loudly and proudly proclaiming that their goal is to nurture nest eggs for the working class, lawmakers have constructed a complex of tax shelters for the well-to-do. The lopsided result is that as of 2019, nearly 29,000 taxpayers had amassed “mega-IRAs” — individual retirement accounts with balances of $5 million or more — while half of American households had no retirement accounts at all. Overall, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 10th of households reap a larger share of the income tax subsidy for retirement savings than the bottom 80 percent.

It’s working out just fine for the financial institutions that manage assets in IRAs and 401(k)s. The combined amount in those vehicles reached $21.6 trillion at the end of 2021 — up fivefold since 2000 — and the more money that pours in, the more that managers collect in fees. A small sliver makes it back to lawmakers in the form of campaign contributions: The largest asset managers — BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity and State Street — gave almost $1.2 million through their political action committees to House and Senate candidates in the last election cycle. But that’s a pittance compared with what these firms stand to gain from Secure 2.0.


University of Virginia law professor Michael Doran — who held tax policy roles at the Treasury Department under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — calls the current state of affairs “the great American retirement fraud.” It’s hard to argue with that description. And Secure 2.0 would take the fraud to a new level: Its congressional supporters have engaged in Enron-style accounting gimmicks to mask the bill’s effects on deficits — tricks that, if used by corporate executives, might well land them in jail. (Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced a broadly similar bill in the upper chamber, though without some of the House’s most egregious accounting shenanigans.)"

 

I've read that there are 22 million millionaires in the United States, so it surprises me that there might be only 29,000 with $5 million in an IRA. A million isn't what it used to be.

 

I would think that most millionaires have better places to park five million.

 

Oh yeah?

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A lot of those 22 million are millionaires on paper only. They might have it as real estate or investment assets but don't have a million dollars in the bank.

 

Another way one could wind up with multiple millions in an IRA is to inherit a goodly sum from someone else's (perhaps multiple someone elses') retirement accounts. It can be pretty byzantine (especially w.r.t. the benefactor's RMDs), but in essence the money flows straight from the benefactor's account(s) to the beneficiary's without Uncle Sam getting a finger on it ... yet.
Nevertheless, the main reason the number of $5 million IRAers is so small relative to the number of millionaires is that to be a millionaire one only has to have a net worth of $1 million. If you've got $5 million in an IRA, your total net worth is almost certainly MUCH larger than $5 million. It's on the order of being at 99th percentile as compared to the 90th.

 

Point noted about the taxability timeline of IRA inheritances ... The one I've been overseeing (the original owner died in 2019), no beneficiaries were named, so the IRS's timeline was largely a moot point: That money was coming out of there ... the plan allowed for 5 years ... and Uncle Sam was getting his.

One of the inheritors, she had this bumblefuck of a financial advisor who was insistent that if the right moves were made the taxes could be deferred indefinitely. I looked into it and looked into it (and paid a couple of people to look into it) and we were unanimous in declaring Sir Edward Jones to be full of shit. Finally I got tired of it all and told him what was going to happen and that if he wasn't OK with that, I would have no trouble finding some other advisor to handle the proceeds. He got really cooperative after that.