IF YOU LIKE YOUR 401(K), YOU CAN KEEP YOUR 401(K): Obama Labor Dept. Sets Stage for Nationalizing Retirement Accounts. Another Obama snatch and run. Time for your money to go to the mattresses.
IF YOU LIKE YOUR 401(K), YOU CAN KEEP YOUR 401(K): Obama Labor Dept. Sets Stage for Nationalizing Retirement Accounts. Another Obama snatch and run. Time for your money to go to the mattresses.
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This is not a new idea...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/03/16/ozy-teresa-ghilarducci-revamp-retirement-savings/24842705/
She wants to kill your 401(k)
Being an economist isn't often a path to fame, but Teresa Ghilarducci found her 15 minutes — and so much more — about seven years ago, when she went to testify before Congress on the intricacies of retirement savings. Overnight, she became a star. That is, if being branded "the most dangerous woman in America" or landing in the sight lines of a chorus of talk-radio characters counts as stardom.
The moment was propitious, in a way. Stock market vagaries had gutted millions of Americans' savings, and though Ghilarducci wasn't exactly celebrating, the crash did validate two decades of work and "every single one of my predictions" about the dangers of 401(k)s, she says. Her alternative is bold: She'd chuck the tax break people receive when they put money into the retirement accounts known as 401(k)s and use the savings to create an entirely new system run by the government. Terms like "government run" and "eliminate tax breaks" are catnip to the right, and Ghilarducci became, for a time, its favorite scratch pole: The woman who wants to "nationalize" 401(k)s, and the like.
If anything, Ghilarducci's brush with notoriety seems to have galvanized her. And over the past couple of years, her ideas have gotten play in huge states with pension problems, like Illinois and California, and with major unions, like the UAW, on healthcare trusts. Senate Democrats have used Ghilarducci's proposals as a springboard for their own plans. "Every candidate will talk to a pension geek," she explains. And "that's me." It's been reported that she's among a group of economists advising all-but-announced presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. (Neither Ghilarducci nor Clinton staffers would confirm — or deny.)
Which would give Ghilarducci, who is 57 with a pixie-like face and a high-energy manner, a broader platform for her controversial ideas than ever before. The daughter of a single welfare mom, Ghilarducci maintains a strong, if often unfashionable, faith in an active government and a strong safety net. How else could she have made it from a dusty California town to tenure at elite universities (first Notre Dame and now the New School, where she directs the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis) to the ear of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee?
It is true that retirement savings have become a sort of sleeper issue. The first of America's baby boom generation started turning 65 in 2011. By 2030, the entire generation will have crossed that senior citizen threshold. When it's over, America's seniors will have leaped from 13.7 percent of the population to 20.3 percent, according to a recent U.S. Census report. And we, as a society, are far from ready for that shift. "The current approach isn't working, and she's been a leading voice on where it's falling short," says Reid Cramer, a budget and economic policy expert at the left-of-center New America Foundation, where Ghilarducci has spoken in the past.
Few would dispute the notion that the U.S. faces a serious retirement crisis. Where the experts differ is on how severe it is and how it should be fixed. Andrew Biggs, an economist at the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, says the best research shows roughly a quarter of Americans are undersaving for retirement. Ghilarducci thinks it's more than half. To fix it, Biggs would solve some of the glitches around 401(k)s, reducing fees and making fee systems more transparent. Ghilarducci? She'd scrap the 401(k) altogether.
She's been saying this for more than 20 years — in 1993, when the vehicle was in its infancy, she wrote an op-ed headlined "Beware the 401(k)." To her labor-economist eye, the 401(k) wrongly shifts risk from the employer to the employee and offers no guaranteed payout. Worse, the mutual funds where people invest are "pretty crappy products," she says. Her alternative would "piggyback on top of Social Security" with a pooled fund Americans can contribute to, but is administered by the government. A certain rate of return is guaranteed. Would it work? No way, argues Biggs, who says government-administered plans face a problem of human nature: "Politicians want to promise benefits and they don't want to pay for them." That's evident in some of the nation's worst pension crises, in places like Detroit.
Ghilarducci's take on government is different, colored by her childhood in Roseville, a town in the California foothills just up Highway 80 from Sacramento. Food stamps, welfare and government grants helped her through — all the way to a Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley. "I find out after I take graduate classes that I happen to be a child of the peak of the welfare state," she exclaims. That realization helped shape her policy beliefs and, according to some, gave her practice of the "dismal science" a very human touch. She has an "equally deep understanding of the impact of economic policy" on people, says Sandra Davis, a spokesperson for the UAW healthcare trust.
For her dissertation, Ghilarducci studied how governments provide for aging citizens. To her, a country's pension system "held the secret of the values and the power relationships of a country." All the financial and benefit mumbo jumbo boils down to "decisions about intergenerational equity." With millions of Americans hitting retirement age unprepared, and the financial security of Social Security in doubt, those are exactly the kind of decisions the next U.S. president won't be able to duck.
OZY is a USA TODAY content partner providing general news, commentary and coverage from around the Web. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY
...Ghilarducci & others like her are a danger to the American way of life. ZThey need to be stopped. Oh, this Facebook page might piss you folks off as well...
https://www.facebook.com/TheNewSchoolforSocialResearch?fref=nf
Not to be the old fum again, but reading about “fidiculary” responsibilities seriously compromised the article's credibility for me. As for the referenced matter, FIDUCIARY responsibility is an unquestionably GOOD thing. It means that a professional, whether investment counselor, attorney, accountant, or whatever, is legally and ethically required to put CLIENT interests ahead of his own.
I don't know what “fidiculary” responsibilities are. Obviously not knowing how to spell a word which is the subject of your story.
That's bullshit. If it were true, millions of retirees wouldn't have lost their asses in the last market correction, because their financial advisors kept them in the market. I know several personally, that their advisors went against conventional wisdom and kept their retired clients in risky investments. Mt parents also lost over $3 million, when their advisor took them out of gold, and put them in a condo conversion project in Houston, that went bankrupt. If I was in NJ, I would be filing negligence and fraud suits against this guy. The biggest problem is, he's a member of their church, and my mother wouldn't let me do anything.
Simple, take power and dissolve the "Department of Labor" along with numerous other departments.
Enough said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33i_BAhuiE0
In Odilldo land, your money is their money....
Well, we knew this was just a matter of time,
So, when does the revolution begin?
This has been a topic for years. I don't see it happening because to piss off almost every working person would spell the end of the progressive hold on power. Even those idiots often have a 401(k). I truly think you'd see open rebellion. Most of us are not like the drones in Europe who act like and are treated like subjects rather than citizens.
Reaching deep in the memory slush and not looking it up, didn't Elizabeth Warren propose this when she was head of one of the "consumer protection" czar things Obama created? Before she was a Senator,'09?
It was the financial services "reform" act, which wasn't just proposed, it was passed, and is now busy driving small and medium sized banks and credit unions out of business.
Right. The CFPB. It is like the civil forfeiture laws except banks and other lenders are the targets.
And if I'm not mistaken, she was the first one to say, " You Didn't Build That!" publicly, long ago. She and Bernie would make a great team.
Yep. In another time the two of them would be hauled before the HUAC hearings.
Just got home Kick, this snark started out as a half joke with my second post, but the more I thought about it... Can't you just see Putin, whomever is in 'control' of China and the checkered cloth guy in Iran just sitting back laughing their asses off? I would.
Easily.
I believe the US government will do this. They do not care about the middle class, and in fact, are doing everything they can to decimate it.
The US government always reinforces bad behavior (out of wedlock babies, why work? we will give you welfare money, jobs, yada, yada, yada) to the detriment of the people who actually were responsible. Never fails.
Most of us are not like the drones in Europe who act like and are treated like subjects rather than citizens.
I would almost agree with you, but if that were true, Obama wouldn't have won a 2nd term.
I'm getting much more pessimistic as the years pass.
Nice avi pj, you're on the Patriot Depot mailing list too I see. ;)
[edit] I thought about it but never got around to it and you beat me again.
LOL, yea, I'm on the mailing list. They have some cool stuff.
I'm with you, as a Reagan Republican I thought America was back on the right track for good. How wrong i was. Obama winning a second term had me feeling we would never again get back on the right track. I too am getting much more pessimistic as the years pass.
Hey, I'm getting more and more pessimistic too but election fraud is different than outright theft of over 150 million IRAs including 401(k)s. Even a dyed in the wool progressive will object to having his 401(k) nationalized and replaced with treasury notes.
No, they won't object at all. Here's how they'll do it.
1. babble about income inequality.
2. tell voters that for every 401(k) dollar they lose, the Kochs (or whichever bogeyman of the moment is up for calumny) will lose $2. The party of envy and stupid greed won't be able to resist.
3. funnel the money from the voters into their own pockets.
4. never actually get around to taking the Koch's money (not because they like them, but because if they actually taxed the super rich, they'd be taxing democrat politicians, and we can't have that.)
5. krugman will write another rubbish editorial about how it's good for the economy.
6. Hillary tells another lie or commits another felony, depending upon what turns up in her calendar of crap to screw her country with.
7. Barry wants to have another commonsense talk about gun control with pajama boy.
8. Donks all get together and sing kumbayah.
As long as Democrats win hard working Americans lose along with their wealth. Election fraud helped, but ultimately did not reelect Obama, Socialism did.
But they won't object to the government seizing your 401(k).
Gotta close it now, the hell with the tax penalty!!
Mine is not as much as the wife's, and she's turning 60 in a couple of weeks so she can withdraw with no penalty.