“The Social Security Fairness Act, signed into law in January by President Joe Biden, eliminated the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Pension Offset (GPO). Those measures reduced or prevented Social Security benefits for more than 3.2 million people with a pension and whose past work wasn’t subject to Social Security taxes, according to the Social Security Administration. Affected recipients include police officers, firefighters, postal workers and public school teachers.”
“The good news is that successful investing doesn’t require advanced math skills or complex strategies. Instead, it starts with understanding the basic building blocks of investing—known as asset classes—and how they fit together. From the relative safety of a savings account to the growth potential of stocks, each type has different potentials for risk and rewards. Understanding where these different assets stand on the investment risk ladder can give you a solid foundation for getting started in investing.”
“What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn,” he said. “That we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place—the last thing we were going to do is lay them off.”
“Every generation has its burdens. The particular plight of Gen X is to have grown up in one world only to hit middle age in a strange new land. It’s as if they were making candlesticks when electricity came in. The market value of their skills plummeted.”
Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.
Here’s how to estimate your monthly Social Security income in retirement.
In 2024, the average Social Security benefit is $1,862 per month, while the maximum for those retiring at full retirement age is $3,822. Achieving the maximum requires earning the taxable maximum for 35 years.
