rudder
Lifer
- Nov 9, 2000
- 19,441
- 86
- 91
Republicans will reek of fear and fearmongering by the time november gets here... this little stinker is only the beginning...
And they are a bunch of racists!
Republicans will reek of fear and fearmongering by the time november gets here... this little stinker is only the beginning...
And they are a bunch of racists!
The only reason the .gov would do this is because they were running out of other sources of funding. Some say that is already starting to slowly happen but I don't really know enough about the subject to form an opinion but lets assume they are ass out of people to lend them money. Do you really think it would be that hard for the .gov to create some sort of crash in the market that would have people scared as hell to keep their money there? Hell, a large portion are STILL scared to put their money back into the market. Just a few days ago the market crashed a 1000 points over some sort of bullshit computer scam that we are "investigating". If a computer can "accidentally" cause a 1000 point freefall it isn't very tinfoil to think that it could intentionally cause one as well.Of course you're making the assumption of another extreme stock market crash in the reasonably near future to even make your idea start to seem remotely viable.
The reality is new taxes to hurt 401k plans are likely to bring out the pitchforks right then because it would negatively impact so many people in what they perceive as an unfair way.
Far more problematically though, people would still take time to decide move their 401Ks over to the new plan, which ties into the other massive problem with it. The people with the greatest incentive to switch would all be those who are closest to retirement since they lost the most amount of money and have the least amount of time to recover so the government plan looks the most attractive.
This leads to the obvious glaring problem in your scenario that the government would actually rather quickly end up paying out more than they take in as people retire and take out money from their 401ks, so the scheme would NEVER actually achieve your hypothetical goal of giving the government more money to spend for a reasonable time period.
This doesn't exactly fit with your argument that there is a plausible threat Democrats would do this is a way anything remotely like you were claiming.
Seize the pensions, then declare them null. Pensions are what is killing our economy. I think California has a 300billion dollar pension fund? Use that money to pay off the debt.
It clearly wasn't plausible though. Basically you expect us to buy this scenario without showing how it could plausibly happen. (And we're increasingly clearly moving away from a scenario remotely resembling the government seizing people's pensions.)Like I said, my post took all of 3 minutes to think and type and it seems sorta plausible. If I can come up with something that is sorta plausible in 3 minutes I would wager that the professional bureaucrats can come up with something really plausible with their teams of experts. I didn't intend for my post to be taken as a real plan, just an example to show that its not that difficult to imagine them being able to entice enough people into their new program.
"New requirements" = "seize"? OP fail English? That's unpossible!
If I recall correctly, the last "burdensome requirement" added to 401(k)s was to warn employees not to put all of their money into company stock. The horror! The horror!
Now Obama is planning to send jackbooted thugs into your home to seize your fishing poles and table salt, but your 401(k) is safe.
Pension Bomb Ticks Louder
California's public funds are assuming unlikely rates of return.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303695604575181983634524348.html
"This month, Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy Research released a study suggesting a more than $500 billion unfunded liability for California's three biggest pension funds—Calpers, Calstrs and the University of California Retirement System. The shortfall is about six times the size of this year's California state budget and seven times more than the outstanding voter-approved general obligations bonds."
http://www.pensiontsunami.com/
.....and since you will not have learned you lesson you will just do it again and again and again.
I agree this would be a good way to go about doing it even after reading Aegeon's response. It would self-feed; as people went with this it would depress the market further and encourage more to go with it.They aren't dumb enough to just come out and seize your 401K but they can rather easily get a large portion of the populace to "voluntarily" hand them over by using the right incentives at the right time.
Just off the top of my head:
Market crashes (nothing doomsday, lets call it 50%, people still haven't recovered from the last crash so now they are really down.
The .gov steps in to "help" and offers a program that gives you pre-crash value of your 401K with the catch being you have to move all of the money into their new "retirement plan" that has a guaranteed rate of return (basically instead of buying stock your buying .gov debt).
Throw in a few taxes to hurt 401Ks and a few tax breaks for the new .gov retirement plan and voila a whole slew of new money for the Federal Government to spend.
Social engineering, it is flat out retarded for them to "force" people to do something that will likely result in the pitchforks coming out when they can simply offer enough incentives to get you to willingly hand it over especially if the people lose even more faith in the market due to another crash and the bullshit computers fucking over people.
Really? It seems to me that the massive public pensions, state and federal, which are predicated upon magical returns and an economy underscored by pixie dust and fairytales, are going to have terrible problems and are likely to look in great part to tax payers to feed the shortcomings.Thats Californias problem not the national taxpayer.
And they are a bunch of racists!
The sky is falling...
What's that? It that akin to learning the lesson of staying banned and not signing up for new accounts like GeneralGrievous, lordtyranus, Zendari and that cool Winnar111 guy did?
Yep, "they" learned their lesson alright /rollseyes
Lets cancel all the pensions of Congress first!