Me being a poor economist, I cannot comprehend the full consequences of the U.S. Federal government deciding that retirement investing in the stock market should be opt-out rather than opt-in. But they promise to be SPECTACULAR.
Spending Bill Aids Retirement Saving – And the Financial Sector
Los Angeles Times, dead tree edition page A7
By Fatima Hussein, 27 December 2022
A section of the $1.7T spending bill passed Friday has been billed as a dramatic step toward shoring up retirement acounts of millions of U.S. workers But the real windfall may go to a far more secure group: the financial services industry.
When even the Fatima Husseins are getting suspicious about what the banksters are doing, it’s bad.
The retirement savings measure labeled Secure 2.0 would reset how people enroll in retirements plans – from requiring them to opt in to requiring them to opt out. The provision is designed to ensure greater participation.
Yep, that’s bad. I’ve never liked the idea of the government forcing me to buy stuff from third parties even when it was just car insurance. Now the government punishes me for not buying medical care from Approved Vendors. Tomorrow, I’ll have to get government permission to NOT piss my money into penny stocks?
Do you remember the furor when Obamacare got passed in the dead of night? I remember that the only people who never offered an opinion, were the insurance companies themselves. What did they think about the government forcing all of North America to be their customer? I really, really wanted to know.
I still do. Because they never talked and nobody else thought to ask.
It also allows workers to use their student loan payments as a substitute for their contributions to retirement plans – meaning they can get matching retirement contributions from their employers by paying off that debt – increases the age for required distributions from plans and expands a tax-deductible saver’s credit.
Translation, the government will stuff taxpayer dollars into the stock markets by first “giving” it to student-loan slaves, with the requirement that they’re never allowed to take it out of the stock markets.
Hmm. It’s money that technically exists but functionally doesn’t.
But as with so many far-reaching spending bills that get little public consideration…
If it wasn’t for domestic terrorists setting fire to the local Sixbucks coffee shop, these bills would get no consideration from the public at all. What a beautiful world it would be, if the local newspaper told its readers what new laws were being actively considered so people could insist on being a participant in America’s proudly fortified democracy. That would be informative and valuable of them, but no, instead they bitch how they’re all going out of business. It’s because you journos are too scared of responsibility to do anything but repeat the AP and Reuters feeds, and then only to tell us what our masters have already decided we want. You’re all the same, so the general public only needs one of you. Hit the tip jar on your way out. I just told you how to save your career… if you are willing.
…provisions of this legislation also benefit corporate interests with a strong financial interest in the outcome.
“Some of these provisions are good and we want to save – but this is a huge boon to the financial services industry,” said Monique Morisey, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Some parts of the bill, she said, are “disguised as savings incentives.”
Probably all the parts are, but there’s no chance that I would understand the all-too-Orwellian-named Secure 2.0… um, sub-bill. The “woulda been called the Secure 2.0 Act except it was passed as part of a gigantic sales receipt.”
Daniel Halperin, a Harvard law professor who specializes in tax policy and retirement savings, said one of the most clear benefits to industry is the provision that gradually increases the age from 72 to 75. “The goal is to leave that money there for as long as possible,” in order to collect administrative fees, he said. “For people who have $5 [million] to $7 [million] to $10 million saved, firms keep collecting fees. It’s crazy to allow them to leave it there.”
Not crazy at all. Even being a financial midwit, I can think of a really good reason to stuff the stock market as full of dollars as possible, for as long as possible. All this inflation we’re having right now? It’s because the government melted the money printers during the Plandemic. So, the inflation will go away if the government seizes & confiscates an equal amount of money.
Am I right? I don’t know, but this is the real promise of CBDC currencies, that the government can simply delete your money in pace with its spending. The holdup is probably them trying to figure out how to make one last for longer than a week, before the people in control of the spending side murder each other in a Night Of Long Knives for the chance to be a God O’ Dough.
This sounds like how they’d do it without waiting for everybody to adopt crypto. Force everybody to pay a percentage into the stock markets and then oops, it’s gone.
Strike that. The money still exists and is still yours, but you aren’t allowed to ever use it again. Which is de facto “oops, it’s gone”.
Companies like Blackrock Funds Services Group, Prudential Financial and Pacific Life Insurance and business lobbying groups such as the Business Roundtable and American Council of Life Insurers are only some of the entities that lobbied lawmakers on Secure 2.0, Senate lobbying disclosures show.
Retiring Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D. Md.) had been ushering Secure 2.0 through the massive spending bill onown as an omnibus. Nearly half of the 92 provisions in Secure 2.0 come, in full or part, from Cardin-Portman legislation that was approved unanimously by the Senate Finance Committee in the summer.”
Segue
h ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Cardin
Benjamin Louis Cardin was born in Baltimore, Maryland. The family name was originally “Kardonsky”, before it was changed to “Cardin”. Cardin’s grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants. His grandfather, Benjamin Green, operated a neighborhood grocery store that later turned into a wholesale food distribution company. His mother, Dora (Green), was a schoolteacher, and his father, Meyer Cardin, served in the Maryland House of Delegates (1935–1937) and later sat on the Baltimore City Supreme Bench (1961–1977).
Cardin and his family attended the Modern Orthodox Beth Tfiloh Congregation near their home, with which the family had been affiliated for three generations.
Every single time. Bolsheviks came in and went straight to the top.
End segue
Still, the latest legislation is a small step meant to assist the millions of Americans who haven’t saved for retirement.
Whether we want to or not, and regardless of what kind of investment and retirement we want. Fortified democracy at its finest!
Meanwhile, the coming Collapse is going to be epic. One imagines the Red Horse of Revelation riding at that time.
We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave
I am loathe the Eagles, but this insight is obvious where fiat currency coupled with high taxation is in play.
Inre retirement funding, I’ve been seeking non-traditional alternatives to 401Ks, IRAs (Roth and standard), and annuities for years, but to no avail. The IRS has made it its missiin to ensure that we slaves funnel all of our “retirement” funding into the Wall Street casino in one way or another – or face nasty tax penalties. The primary mission of the IRS, like that of all agencies of the American Deep State, is first and foremost to ensure the health of the Bankster Plunderbund class at our expense.
So true. I have a 401k. I am putting 14% of my income into it, mainly for tax reasons. But the money, while technically existing, is basically inaccessible to me. I can withdraw only a small amount of it, and only then by paying income tax on it AND a huge “penalty” on top of that for withdrawing it. And it’s all funneled into the stock market.