OBAMA GOES AFTER RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS


By: John Hayward
4/10/2013 05:37

Yet another piece of rotted fruit spilling from the grim cornucopia of President Obama’s 2014 budget proposal is his summary judgement of how much other people can “fairly” keep in their retirement accounts, as reported by The Hill:

President Obama’s budget, to be released next week, will limit how much wealthy individuals – like Mitt Romney – can keep in IRAs and other retirement accounts.
Wait a second… what does Mitt Romney have to do with any of this? Obama’s cap on retirement savings is not, by any stretch of the imagination, restricted to “people like Mitt Romney.” It prevents the accumulation of more than $3 million in tax-preferred retirement accounts. $3 million is not Romney money. He’s only dragged into the story because there were “questions” during the 2012 campaign about “how the former Massachusetts governor was able to squirrel away so much money in that sort of retirement account.”

Anyway, back to The Hill’s explanation of the retirement cap:

The proposal would save around $9 billion over a decade, a senior administration official said, while also bringing more fairness to the tax code.

The senior administration official said that wealthy taxpayers can currently “accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.”

Under the plan, a taxpayer’s tax-preferred retirement account, like an IRA, could not finance more than $205,000 per year of retirement – or right around $3 million this year.
Not only is Barack Obama the “investment” genius who poured your money into a string of bankruptcies from Solyndra to Fisker Automotive, but now he’s a retirement guru too. He’ll decide how much you need for your golden years. It’s $205,000 a year right now, but he could change his mind later. He probably will, as soon as he needs more tax money. Limitless power lurks within the ability to arbitrarily define “fairness.”

Does anyone think Obama will be content to retire with a “reasonable level of retirement saving” that gives him only $205k per year? His greens fees at the golf course are more than that.

I just did a quick read through the Constitution, and I don’t see anything in there about the President having the power to decide how much retirement money is “fair” or “reasonable,” so I think I’ll have to take a pass on granting him the authority to carry out this brilliant plan. Besides, it sounds like another step down the road to Cyprus, and we really don’t want to go there.

This crackdown on tax-preferred retirement savings is coming from the same President who can’t wait to relaunch the subprime mortgage disaster, by leaning on banks to make risky loans to unqualified home buyers. He’s discouraging people from saving their own money, while encouraging the accumulation of debt they can’t afford. That sounds like a good formula for dissolving independence.

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/04/1...ment-accounts/