Financial Planning in the Cigarette Economy.

Financial Planning now amounts to no more than fueling the Wall St. Superclass that's been empowered by Washington to control your money until you need it, when it becomes obvious it is actually their money, always was.... Like health insurance that you pay for at work, for thirty years, which, once you're in your 50's, you're laid off (part of the plan, BTW), the health care ends, and that tens of thousands of dollars You've sunk into insurance is just vapor: the money's gone, the insurance's gone, and soon you're gone. Perfect financial planning ... Wall St.-style.

From financial experts and economists of real brick and mortar, not the Bernanke-type academics who have a formulated plan that no amount of real world data will change, the consensus is that the deleveraging of America and much of the global economy will trump everything else. So any financial planning that you do on a personal basis is doomed from the start. Think of it this way: a citizen of the Soviet Union in the 80's could do as much planning as she wished, but when the US decided to destroy the economy of that Communist nation, in order to gain access to the (Way overestimated) resources of the Caspian region, it destroyed all the hopes and financial planning of every Soviet citizen.

Today, having fallen into the same trap, which it now boasts it used to bleed the Soviet economy: an endless quagmire of War in Afghanistan, with a dollop of Iraq, and soon to be Pakistan and Iran, for extra measure, the US has dug itself into the same pit, and has neither hope nor plan for escape. The difference is, of course, that the US entanglement was/is a planned entanglement devised by a deranged Superclass of elite oligarchs of self-appointed CEO's of defense Industry (which now includes Burger-King and Starbucks, as they rake in billions from lucrative contracts on US military bases) and Financial TBTF conglomerates and Pentagon Generals.

So, think of the "New Economy" as the "Cigarette Economy": sucker your citizens while they're young into consumption that feels good and gives them a rush for the moment but sucks away at any hope of healthful longevity, leaving a populace that gets to their 50's and then rapidly dies off as they're thrown out of jobs, off health care rolls, and whose pension plans dematerialize into bankruptcy before their eyes.

Perhaps the only way out is to make yourself into a business. Even as the atmosphere has turned decidedly deadly for individuals, it is extremely pro-business. Find out what you're good at, (or bad at for that matter: can you say GM, BofA?), and incorporate. Since all the growth in the economy now comes from The State, make it a product or service that the State needs, the most profitable and lucrative are those bent on destruction, and grow from there. Then just light up and inhale the deadly fumes ..... ahhh now You too are Milken it.