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Obama Administration to Go After Retirement Accounts

When threats of Communism were in the news, books were written at a feverish pace reminding us of the insidious nature of the beast. There were the “useful idiots” who praised communism, but they were few and far between. But there were others who believed that while communism was something we did not want to imitate, we could work with communists for common ends.

There were always warnings, however, that you can trust the communists . . . to be communists. In fact, there was a book by that title written by Fred Schwarz in 1960: You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communists) when it came to their allies, intellectual dishonesty, education, children and literature, brainwashing and language, the manipulation of truth, relativism, and the use of the term “peace.” Communists were always going to be communists no matter how much wishful thinking hoped to believe otherwise.

In a similar way, you can trust liberals to always be liberals or progressives. They will always push taxing and spending policies. We’re seeing more of the consistency of liberals in their call from removing the debt ceiling and the daily insistence that taxes must be raised in the rich so they can pay their “fair share,” a plank, by the way, that’s taken right out of the Communist Manifesto.

But there’s only so much money that can be squeezed out of the wealthy. The money has to come from somewhere to fund the liberal version of Utopia. Inflation, increasing the money supply via the printing press, can do long-term damage to the economy.

When liberals agreed to set up retirement accounts where taxation could be postponed, a lot of people were skeptical. Why would any liberal agree to such a thing? Now we’re beginning to hear rumblings about the possibility that the Obama administration is looking at the trillions of dollars of potential revenue in these accounts as Jeff Berwick is warning us:

“[T]he National Seniors Council has announced that ‘Obama (has) Begun to Push for a New National(ized) Retirement System.’ According to them, a recent hearing sponsored by the Treasury and Labor Departments marked the beginning of the Obama Administration’s effort to nationalize the nation’s pension system and to eliminate private retirement accounts including IRAs and 401k plans.”

Who will object to such a takeover? Certainly the people who have money in these accounts, but not the people who don’t. The appeal will be made to the 51 percent who voted for Obama. “Why should the wealthy have what you can’t afford to participate in?,” promoters of the takeover will argue.

Retirement funds will be in the same category as Social Security, collected and managed by the State. Is there historical precedent for this type of statist action? You bet there is:

“In late 2010 Hungary’s government gave its citizens a choice: hand over all their savings to the government or lose all their state pension money. The government sought control over Hungarians’ $14 billion in individual retirement accounts. The Bulgarian government did something very similar when it tried to transfer $300 million in private early retirement savings into a state pension scheme. They only managed to get roughly 20% of the funds they sought. Last year Ireland raided the private stash in the National Pension Reserve Fund with a 0.6% levy under the label of a ‘jobs plan’ in order to bail out insolvent Irish banks.”

Liberals will never change. You can trust them always to believe and act as liberals, that is, liberal with other people’s money. None of it is really ours. We only get to keep what they allow us to keep.

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