You’re right. 401k plans aren’t even really retirement plans, they’re tax deferral plans. All the most challenging retirement issues (how to withdraw the money in retirement and make it last a lifetime) are basically ignored.
I will say that SS is actually pretty good. I am very open to policy debates that it should have more wealth transfer baked in but for what it is it does a good job. Like almost all public pension programs globally it has suffered from “kick the can down the road” mismanagement but it nonetheless is probably a net positive system even in its flawed form. Consider how fucked the median American is on retirement savings and then imagine if on top of THAT people had lost SS coverage 20 years ago.
So what happened with the poster’s buddy who had a gambling problem and wasn’t selling his GME but was gonna go broke? … Did he get out when it bounced?
I think they’re also doing record business. Though that doesn’t really mean shit when it comes to stocks. Stocks go up, stocks go down, can’t explain that!
They do, although it varies state by state. There’s a good summary here:
It’s probably harder for an existing manufacturer to go dealer-free than a new entrant, though. If you go to war with your dealers, you also lose your service network for all your existing vehicles.
The only reason most car dealerships are still a thing is political protection full stop. They’re a legacy of a time before the internet made it possible to manage larger business empires. This is also why being a fast food franchisee has gotten steadily worse over the last 20-30 years and most genuinely good new concepts just raise money to open new locations instead of franchising.
Dealers are incredibly powerful politically, like almost unimaginably so given the relatively small size of the industry.
It’s not hard to imagine a federal law ending all the bullshit, eventually. Buying a car thru a dealership is absolute torture. Not only does it take forever, you have to fend off all kinds of sleazy sales bullshit. The F&I dance, where they painfully make you sit through a very aggressive push for all kinds of borderline useless products, is especially miserable and exploitive. The average dealer makes $1500 per car in F&I.
