Thursday, January 28, 2010

Hold Onto Your (Retirement) Wallet

Soon, the Government will be reaching for it. In "Prepare Now to Escape Obama’s Retirement Trap," January 21, 2010, Ron Holland warns:

"The largest source of liquid private wealth remaining in the United States are the $15 trillion in private retirement funds and the ultimate ownership, control and future of these funds have already been compromised and exchanged for the favorable tax treatment of private retirement plans. Congress writes the laws, so they can tax, penalize, hold your funds hostage and although they’d never use the word, “confiscate” your assets at their discretion.

The retirement trap ... is only a proposal at the present time and since it may well begin in the latter years of the Obama Administration ... I’m calling it the “Obama Retirement Trap”. But make no mistake, the government need for current revenue and their frenzied search for a short-term fix to fund a backstop of liquidity to buy future government debt obligations when no credible investors will buy them is an unspoken quest of both political parties. The establishments of both political parties will do anything to stay in power and this will include raiding and pillaging your retirement funds.

The prototype for their plan was devised in 1991 by Alicia H. Munnell, then Director of Research for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. She presented the idea in a paper entitled “Current Taxation of Qualified Pension Plans: Has the Time Come?”

Later she was promoted to Assistant Treasury Secretary, and along with Robert Reich, Henry Cisneros and Hillary Clinton, she began to plot a raid on retirement funds. One element of the scheme was to create a Mandatory Pension System and fund it with a one-time 15% tax on retirement assets and a recurring 15% tax on retirement plan income.

The latest leftist plan first appeared in 2007 at the Economic Policy Institute: Agenda for Shared Prosperity. In 2008, she became the new Director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research. In her book, “When I’m 64: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them”, she hypes her retirement solution for millions who do not have adequate retirement savings and her solution is to confiscate most of the retirement assets of successful Americans.

A plan this radical can’t just be slipped through Congress. It can only ride into law on a first-class national crisis. Have you noticed that somehow the politicians are always able to find one when they need one. According to the author, there could be several possible triggers:

Loss of Triple-A Status for U.S. Treasury Bonds
(most likely)
Terrorist Attack or Military Disaster

Another Economic Meltdown

A Run on Treasury Debt by Foreign Investors

[Assuming the most likely scenario] At some time during the next decade, a global run on treasury debt and the dollar will also likely take the American stock market down past lows not seen since the financial meltdown crisis in 2008 and 2009. The 50% to 75% stock market pullback during the actual bankruptcy of the Washington debt and paper dollar will send shock waves through retirees and current plan participants as their private retirement plan balances plummet.

At this time, Washington will come to the rescue and guarantee all private retirement plan market values back to pre-crisis levels. The gullible American public will overwhelmingly support this effort by switching their dwindling funds into the Guaranteed Retirement Annuity managed by the government. For the first few years, Washington will probably label those few of us who warn that that Americans have lost their retirement benefits as extremists, Ron Paul paranoids and Tea Party advocates.

Then it will become crystal clear to all Americans that their retirement benefits have been given away for a promise by an evil group of plunderers who have never in their history kept a promise, a guarantee or their word on anything. The greatest theft of wealth in the history of the world will have taken place and only those few who heeded an early warning will still have their retirement benefits and security.

I still remember when many years ago, the Government first proposed "Individual Retirement Accounts", my father saying, "My concern is that someday the Government will decide it needs that money and take it." Seems now like he might turn out to be quite the prophet.

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