Will The Government Seize Our Retirement Funds?

Is Obama planning to pull “a Cyprus”, taking away money in individual retirement accounts and funds to help finance even more out-of-control government spending? It appears that might be the case, where people with IRA's and 401(k) retirement accounts will be forced to use some portion of their retirement funds to buy Treasury bonds. Of course such a move will move billions of dollars out of the hands of present and future retirees and give it to the government interest free with absolutely no guarantee they'll ever see a dime of the money they've 'invested' in Treasuries. Call it yet another across the board theft of private property at the hands of a Hugo Chavez wannabe. This isn't the first time the leftists in government have tried to confiscate private savings.

The left has had its eye on retirement savings for years, but so far takeover attempts have been rebuffed. One egregious attempt was the proposal, following the 2010 financial crisis, to "safeguard" retirement savings by requiring that they be rolled over into Treasury bonds. Had this legislation succeeded, it would have appropriated all or part of the retirement savings of millions of Americans. The funds would have been used to finance further expansion of government. In return, savers would have received a promissory note from the federal government similar that issued by the Social Security Trust Fund.

Needless to say, most investors were not keen to convert their savings into Treasury obligations -- or, to be more precise, into an unsecured note promising a return approximating that of Treasury bonds. That is because, as with every other endeavor, government's management of retirement savings (aka Social Security) has been a disaster.

They haven't been able to handle the funds used for day to day operations properly, so why should we give them money we earned, saved, and invested and give it an organization we know will piss it away and will, in the end, return pennies on the dollar (if anything at all). This is just another way to kick the financial can down the road and to leave the younger generations holding the bag when they run out of our money. After all, they (meaning LBJ and congressional Democrats) robbed Social Security in the 60's to pay for the Vietnam War and they haven't made good on the billions of dollars of IOU's they left behind. Why should we trust their descendants to honor their word to pay us back? Only a fool would do so.

Wiping out retirement funds isn't the only downside to forcing us to 'invest' in government bonds.

Despite its 2010 failure to take over retirement savings, the left has not given up. As reported in WND, officials at the U.S. Treasury and Labor Departments continue discussions aimed at channeling private savings into Treasury obligations via a so-called "Automatic IRA." Once it has forced workers and employers to contribute to Automatic IRAs, and eventually forced existing savings into government obligations as well, government would control much of the investment capital in America. The free market will cease to exist.

This sounds like it's right out of the Marxist Economic Handbook, which it is, as well as one of the nightmare scenarios depicted in Atlas Shrugged. Again, the political class seems to think they know how to spend our money better than we do, an arrogant belief with no basis in reality. As we have seen throughout the past hundred years or so, they are in no way wise enough or competent enough to run other people's lives as in most cases they can't even run their own.

If we let them do this to us, our nation is finished as an economic power. We will suffer the fate of any other socialist economy – government bankruptcy and economic ruin. The Powers-That-Be are suffering from insanity if they think they won't make the same mistakes as their predecessors. The only difference this time is that the damage will be much worse, much wider, and will last a lot longer. Atlas Shrugged will be a best case scenario if these arrogant bastards get their way.