Labor activist flat-out wrong about retirement plan

A guest editorial written by a labor activist is so dishonest and flat-out wrong that it borders on being offensive.

In The Stranger, a local nanny, Ty Messiah, promoted the Mayor Tim Burgess-backed proposal that mandates employers offer retirement accounts. They would be run by a third party and employers wouldn’t have to put funds into it, other than setup fees, a small annual fee per employer, and whatever is required to maintain employees’ access to it.

We can certainly debate the merits of the plan. My producer is a fan, while I am not, Though we both agree that planning for retirement is incredibly important, the program is debatable.

But what cannot be debated is an absurd and dishonest claim in Messiah’s editorial:

Right now, a retirement plan isn’t even really an option for nannies. Even if a family employing a nanny wanted to provide retirement, it wouldn’t be very practical to set up an entire plan for a single employee. That’s why it so important that these things happen across the whole industry or the whole city, as the mayor has proposed.

She’s 100 percent incorrect. So incorrect, in fact, I suspect this was a purposeful lie. There’s no debate on this. Any nanny — anyone, period, who has the funds — can create a retirement savings account even if it’s not offered by their employer. I have one with Vanguard, created when I was working as an independent contractor for an out-of-state employer.

Messiah can open an account, on her own, without her employer ever getting involved. I’ll make it easier for her: click on this link, Messiah.

It’s a convenient falsehood meant to further a ridiculous position that the government is responsible for our well-being; not our own individual actions.

Retirement savings are good. Yay. Government is making it so that I now have a savings account. Yay. Government intervention is good! The reason why activists want this is to get you more hooked on government help and because, truthfully, they kind of think you’re stupid and lazy. Too stupid to realize you can get a retirement account yourself; and too lazy to actually do it once you find out. I don’t believe that. You’re perfectly capable, even Messiah, when she’s not busy writing propaganda pieces for The Stranger.

As it turns out, personal responsibility is better because you don’t need government to force a business to offer you something you already can do on your own. Why might you want to do this on your own? You’re saving precious taxpayer dollars from being spent on onerous systems and boards to implement something they don’t need to spend money on. Yay.

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