Worried about your 401K? Read a poem and pour yourself a mocktail | Opinion
Billionaire Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, once gave this advice to worried investors: Read a poem.
But not just any poem. It had to be Rudyard Kipling’s “If” — the 1896 classic that starts like this: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs ...”
“You” being the calm and cool investor who is staying the course while everyone else is running around screaming, “The Dow is falling! The Dow is falling!”
Kipling eventually cuts to the chase and tells us about the awards we can look forward to if we do as he says: “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it; And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!”
That advice is being recycled, once again, by financial advisers who offer it as an antidote to the economic chaos President Donald Trump is inflicting on the world with his latest round of tariffs.
“As Kipling says, keep your head, ignore breathless headlines and keep doing your thing,” a writer for CNBC instructs us.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to ignore what’s happening when financial experts are also saying things like this: “I always think that when gambling, at least you have a chance of winning. This is worse than that,” conservative economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin told the New York Times.
This is no ordinary financial crisis. Patting us on the head and telling us not worry — and by the way, maybe we shouldn’t even be looking at our 401K balances right now? — is not making us feel better. People are angry and scared. They have a right to be; the president is gambling with our futures.
Older Americans are already worried about health care and Social Security, and now they have to watch their retirement accounts shrink?
And what about families barely scraping by as it it? Tariffs will cost the lowest-income American households at lea; st $1,700 per year, according to the Yale Budget Lab.
Poems and platitudes aren’t cutting it. They make about as much sense as trying to drown our sorrows in mocktails — if we can even afford fancy drink ingredients like fresh pineapple and coconut once Trump’s tariffs kick in.
The Wrath of Trump
It’s not just that we’re in an economic meltdown. It’s how we got here that blows.
This is all Donald Trump’s doing — with an assist from Republicans in Congress who are too weak to stand up to him. (This is a good place for a shout-out to the four GOP senators who risked incurring the Wrath of Trump by voting with Democrats to block tariffs on Canadian imports: Rand Paul, Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell and Lisa Murkowski.)
The president is attempting to bend the world economy to his wishes, and he doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process.
He’s already told us as much.
He said he “couldn’t care less” that carmakers would raise prices, after he imposed a 25% tariff on foreign cars and car parts.
It doesn’t matter to him if you have to pay $4,000 more for that car you need. Consider it a contribution to rebuilding our economy.
“This is going to lead to the construction of a lot of plants, in this case auto plants,” Trump predicted when he announced the tariffs. “You’re going to see numbers like you haven’t seen… in terms of employment. You’re going to have a lot of people making a lot of cars.”
Dyeing potatoes instead of Easter eggs
This is not the Donald Trump we heard on the campaign, who made this promise: “So when I win I will immediately bring prices down starting on Day One.”
Well, he’s now been in office more than 50 days, and prices are going in the wrong direction.
Eggs are still so expensive that some folks are considering dyeing potatoes for Easter.
Thanks to that 10% across-the-board tariff, many everyday items like bananas and coffee and chocolate will get at least a little pricier, while imports from countries subject to higher tariffs will get much more expensive. Not just cars but also appliances, electronics, clothing, toys — and anything shipped from Lesotho.
There is a chance that Trump will backtrack on tariffs — he’s done it before — and the economic crisis will subside.
Then again, it could drag on for months or even years, so long that some of us may not be around when the economy recovers.
And who knows how long it will be before other nations trust us again, after Trump has threatened their economies and ignored longstanding alliances.
Trump’s tariff tantrum is yet another sign that we are at the mercy of a president who thrives on creating chaos, consequences be damned.
A poem — no matter how inspirational — is not going to help us through this mess.
We need strong leaders in the House and Senate who will stop giving in to Trump’s every whim and protect their constituents by passing legislation that will deny Trump unilateral power to impose tariffs.
Kipling would surely approve.
This story was originally published April 5, 2025 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Worried about your 401K? Read a poem and pour yourself a mocktail | Opinion."
