More on the security of your 401(k)

Like, you were under the impression that your IRA or 401K was really yours??
You did the responsible thing. You saved in your IRA or 401(k) to support your retirement, when you could have spent that money on another vacation, or an upscale car, or fancier clothes and jewelry. But now Washington is developing plans for your retirement savings.
BusinessWeek reports that the Treasury and Labor departments are asking for public comment on “the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams.”
In plain English, the idea is for the government to take your retirement savings in return for a promise to pay you some monthly benefit in your retirement years.
They will tell you that you are “investing” your money in U.S. Treasury bonds. But they will use your money immediately to pay for their unprecedented trillion-dollar budget deficits, leaving nothing to back up their political promises, just as they have raided the Social Security trust funds.
This “conversion” may start out as an optional choice, though you are already free to buy Treasury bonds whenever you want. But as Karl Denninger of the Market Ticker Web site reports: “‘Choices’ have a funny way of turning into mandates, and this looks to me like a raw admission that Treasury knows it will not be able to sell its debt in the open market — so they will effectively tax you by forcing your ‘retirement’ money to buy them.” [...]
Argentina provided a precedent in 2008, taking over that country’s private retirement accounts for forced investment in government bonds to cover spiraling deficits. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard editorialized at the time in Britain’s Daily Telegraph that this may be “a foretaste of what may happen across the world as governments discover .. . that the bond markets are unwilling to plug the (deficit) gap. . .. My fear is that governments in the U.S., Britain and Europe will display similar reflexes.”
This is just the latest chapter in what is developing into a war by the left on America’s seniors. All that class-war rhetoric about “the rich” ends up targeting seniors, who tend to have accumulated the most in savings and investment on average because they have been around the longest.
Socialist Dems taking a cue from Argentina. Heh. John at Powerline Blog writes:
Over the last four decades, Americans have saved hundreds of billions of dollars in such retirement accounts. I haven’t seen figures lately, but the total of such savings is most likely in the trillions.
Now we have an improvident federal government that has spent itself into a state of near-bankruptcy. It can survive only by selling Treasury bills to Americans and foreigners, but as the government’s debts accumulate, international demand for T-bills slackens. So the Democrats are looking for money. They can’t help noticing that Americans have saved many billions of dollars–private property, theoretically, but under contemporary constitutional jurisprudence, subject to pretty much any whim that may come out of Washington.
Kim Priestap writes:
Ever since Barack Obama was elected, we’ve seen larger and larger chunks of American life being gobbled up by government. Today’s Democrats are nothing more than thug socialists who can’t stand that there are still large swaths of the American people still living independently from government largesse and control. Now they are using what remaining power they have in Congress to change that. If the government takes over health care, college student loans, and retirement savings then no one, no matter how wealthy, can escape the thumb of big government.
This is why the Taxed Enough Already movement was born last year. Not “anti-government” but anti-statist. And it is the growing pushback by the “stupid people” that has Leftist authoritarians — from the triumvirate of Obama-Reid-Pelosi to the ilk of ACORN-SEIU-MSM — scrambling to suppress, bully, smear or even trick it (faux promotion of a 3rd party) in order to keep anti-statists from the polls in November.
If a person is no longer an independent individual, how can one muster the courage to fight* back? Indeed, the “narrative” promoted on the Left in support of Nannystatism is that there really is no such thing as “individual success” — individuals are “taking advantage” of the State’s gifts (education, economy, laws) so all success is really the State’s success. Individuals “owe” the State. Meritocracy is a myth, they cry. It is all a matter of redistribution of wealth and privilege, so SHUT UP and FEED ME! For all the eight years of blather that GW and admin was “shredding the Constitution”, it pales to what the Left has been trying to get done this first year of The Won’s presidency.
Unless this is turned around soon, we will be handing our children and grandchildren a far bleaker future.
*troll alert: contrary to harridan Arianna Huffington’s self-serving and cynical hysteria, I use “fight” here metaphorically.