Through nearly 30 years in the human resources game I have studiously avoided benefits for two reasons.  One is that I find them boring.  Two is that I find them too boring to think about.  Now I am going to break out and tell you something about benefits that is profoundly simple, yet important.

A story on August 4, 2008 in the WSJ dealt with pension plans.  To make a long boring story short it confirmed a great truth which is, 99.9% of the people in the world are too ignorant or stupid to predict the stock market.  That includes almost all the people who make a living at it.  Outside of Buffett of Omaha I don’t trust anyone’s judgment regarding the market.

The story told about how the West Virginia teachers got into a bind when they switched from a defined benefit pension plan to a 401(k) about 1991.  When left to their own choices about investing their savings most opted for a too conservative approach.  The good news is they didn’t lose their shirt in the dotcom crash.  The bad news is their retirement fund grew at a very low rate, meaning they could run out of money before they died.

Why care about this?  Have you heard some bozos in congress want to give people a choice on how to invest their social security money?  Those gutless vote chasers are too stupid or too afraid to come up with a plan to save SS so they want to dump it on the 99.9% who don’t know what to do.  Letting us decide where to invest our SS funds would be a mistake of indescribable proportions.  Better to leave it alone, increase the input and keep the vote chasers hands out of the cookie jar.