Posts Tagged Government
THE GOVERNMENT WANTS YOUR RETIREMENT
Posted by Harley in Banking, The Economy on February 26, 2010
I will soon have another free report for you that will protect you from this power grab but right now it is imperative that you read the following. Do not be fooled by the government speak that they are looking for ways to help you. It’s all about deceiving you into believing they have your best interests in mind.
NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH!
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it.” ~ Frederic Bastiat
THE GOVERNMENT WANTS YOUR RETIREMENT
By
Neal Boortz@ February 3, 2010 8:51 AM Permalink | Comments (105) | TrackBacks (0)
I’ve been telling you about this for a while now. This, to me, is one of the most dangerous schemes currently slithering through the crevices and dark spots of the Imperial Federal Government in Washington. What am I talking about? What I believe to be plans by the Obama administration to, in effect, seize your retirement funds and use them to finance their deficit spending. Remember … there are more than $3 trillion dollars sitting out there in individual retirement, IRA and 401K plans. Politicians just cant stand the idea of this much money sitting out there in private investments … out of the grasp of politicians. So …. Something needs to be done. And sure enough, something is going to be done. The Treasury Department and the Department of Labor were going to start taking comments on ways to promote the idea converting 401(k) savings and IRAs into annuities or other steady payment streams. Well you can finally take a look at this document for yourself:
Request for Information Regarding Lifetime Income Options for Participants and
Beneficiaries in Retirement Plans
Here, I’ll post a little to get you started:
The Department of Labor and the Department of the Treasury (the “Agencies”) are currently reviewing the rules under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and the plan qualification rules under the Internal Revenue Code (Code) to determine whether, and, if so, how, the Agencies could or should enhance, by regulation or otherwise, the retirement security of participants in employer-sponsored retirement plans and in individual retirement arrangements (IRAs) by facilitating access to, and use of, lifetime income or other arrangements designed to provide a lifetime stream of income after retirement. The purpose of this request for information is to solicit views, suggestions and comments from plan participants, employers and other plan sponsors, plan service providers, and members of the financial community, as well as the general public, on this important issue.
That’s a lot of government-speak. Can you read between the lines? What is the real plan here? Behind this nonsense about “lifetime stream of income after retirement” language is a lovely little plan to force you to finance the Democrat’s deficit spending. The plan is to play into the current economic fears. “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Remember the words of Rahm? The Democrats want you to question whether or not Wall Street is the right place to invest your money. Wouldn’t you be safer if the government kept it for you? The government wants you to believe that it can do a better job of investing and managing your retirement than you can. And for a lot of people who believe that government is the answer, they may fine with this. It’s not fine with me, and, I suspect, it’s not all that fine with you.
Don’t believe me? Here is how these agencies present their reasoning:
Accordingly, with the continuing trend away from traditional defined benefit plans to 401(k) defined contribution plans and hybrid plans … employees are not only increasingly responsible for the adequacy of their savings at the time of retirement, but also for ensuring that their savings last throughout their retirement years … In recognition of the foregoing, the Agencies are considering whether it would be appropriate for them to take future steps to facilitate access to, and use of, lifetime income or other arrangements designed to provide a stream of income after retirement.
Here is one of the questions asked in this document from the Treasury Department and the Department of Labor:
13. Should some form of lifetime income distribution option be required for defined contribution plans (in addition to money purchase pension plans)? If so, should that option be the default distribution option, and should it apply to the entire account balance? To what extent would such a requirement encourage or discourage plan sponsorship?
Okay, what is this question really asking? First, it wants to know if the government should FORCE you to contribute money to an income distribution option. Then the second part of the question wants to know if this should be the standard retirement option, unless you choose to also put your money elsewhere.
OK .. I’m a little disjointed here. Let me try to wrap up all of this up in one neat package.
Obama’s budget is setting records in deficit spending. Obama is proposing borrowing every close to the amount of money that the Republicans borrowed in a single year .. but Obama is proposing borrowing that sum EVERY SINGLE MONTH throughout his term of office and beyond.
Earlier this week I told you of a story from the investment press which stated that investors now look at blue chip stocks like Coca Cola as better and safer investments than U.S. Government treasury certificates. China has signaled that it is not in the mood to buy many more U.S. government securities. This is how we finance our debt! If investors and other nations won’t voluntary finance our debt, what does our government do? Well, our government does what governments always do. Fall back on its unique ability to use force to accomplish its goals. There’s a problem here. We aren’t going to force China to buy more Treasuries … so where is the force to be applied? YOU, that’s where.
The government is talking about some form of “lifetime income distribution” and “lifetime stream of income.” (Isn’t this what Social Security was supposed to do?) But just HOW does the government provide this “lifetime” income? Simple … by FORCING you to take all or a portion of your retirement funds and invest them where China won’t go; invest them where private international investors no longer want to go; invest them in Treasury Certificates. Oh yeah … they’ll probably come up with some fancy new name for some fancy new type of T-bill … but the goal and the effect will be the same. You’ll see your money seized by government and used to finance the insane spending plans of politicians .. Democrat and Republican.
Stay alert folks. The government has wonderful ways to couch this in language that seams harmless and innocuous. It’s a money-grab. Nothing less.
Outlook For The Year Ahead ~ Continued
Posted by Harley in The Economy on January 20, 2010
3) Do you think the Obama Administration is too well meaning and intelligent to lead us down a path of destruction? Well, consider this quote from one of the best researched books on the Great Depression, FDR’s Folly, by Jim Powell.
“Why did the smart, well educated, well intentioned New Dealers back policies that prolonged the Great Depression? How could they have gone so wrong? Most of the New Dealers were lawyers . Few among them, including FDR, had any practical business experience. The New Dealers came to believe that their knowledge, combined with their political power, could cure the problems of the world. They thought that by issuing executive orders, passing laws, raising taxes, and redistributing money, they could make society better.”
4) Look at the chart below on the business experience of the Obama Administration, compared to that of each Administration since 1900. Its frightening to realize how little our current leaders know about how the real world operates, especially with the economic conditions we face today.
Almost no one in Obama’s administration has ever had a job outside of government, much less owned a company in the private sector where they were forced to make payroll, or even to use Quickbooks to make sure that the company could pay its bills.
America, Please Wake Up! ~ Part One
Posted by Harley in The Economy on December 29, 2009
Have you noticed that the only sector of America that has grown exponentially during 2009 is government and they’re done it on the backs of us taxpayers? All the way from local government through state and on to Washington, these parasites are enjoying unprecedented prosperity while the rest of America’s free enterprise system is suffering.
In a recent analysis, USA Today analyzed 2M Federal workers tracked by the database of the Office of Personnel Management which excludes the White House, Congress, the Postal Service, Intelligence agencies and uniformed Military personnel. It found that 19% of Federal workers make more than $100,000 per year before overtime and bonuses compared to 14% when the recession began. The average Federal workers’ pay is much higher now than the average private sector worker’s pay. The leeches’ average $71,206/year versus the American free enterprise worker’s average of $40,331/year. If the excluded portion, not counting our great military, were added in, these figures would be even more outrageous.
In my own state of Colorado, the Governor added 4000 state government jobs while free enterprise lost jobs. My County government reneged on a senior property tax reduction so that the county could use it for the county government parasites.
I’m sure that if you look at your own state and counties you will find the same “stealing” by government on the backs of the taxpayers. We must take America back from these non-representative government bodies whose population is getting very close to out-numbering those of us in free enterprise who are working our tails off to satisfy the government’s appetite for our money. Please do your part to let these government parasites know that you will not take it any longer. It’s absolutely outrageous!
Our own government placates us with phony indexes manipulated to tell us things are better than we think. Food and energy costs are eliminated from the CPI – the consumer price index – so they can tell us prices have not increased due to much money chasing too few goods. How stupid do they think we are? Energy costs affect so many products, it’s not funny! Also, any time particular index items are susceptible to abrupt price movements, these items are eliminated from the computation for CPI so government can report a lower rate of inflation.
Then you have unemployment figures that do not include people who have stopped looking for work or part time workers who can’t find permanent work. By adding these people to the unemployed roles, total unemployment rises to 12%-15%, not the so-called 10% that is reported. Despite the Obama administration’s predictions that unemployment (which leaves out the 2 categories of workers above) would peak at 8% in 2009, unemployment has doubled since 1/1/08 thanks to wasteful boondoggle government bailouts and stimulus packages which will add even more people to the unemployed ranks.
The Federal government reports a debt of $12T. Total hogwash! That figure does not include off budget balance sheet liabilities such as unfunded pensions of $2T, state debt shortfalls $3.5T, current budget deficit $1.7T plus $1T more for the next 10 years, and, last but not least, those infamous entitlement programs of $60T. The real debt of the USA is more like $89T and rising to $100T. America is bankrupt! And yet, governments at all levels won’t stop spending and want to tax us even more, i.e.: health care, cap and trade, etc.. When will the people of the United States revolt?
This concludes Part One of “America, Please Wake Up!” the Conclusion is coming right behind it in a day or two. You don’t want to miss it!
All Is Not Well
Posted by Harley in The Economy on December 7, 2009
I try to give you plenty of value which includes posting other articles that substantiate my comments. Here’s another one to pay attention to. Also, I suggest you read Crash Proof 2.0: How to Profit From the Economic Collapse
Saturday, December 5, 2009
All is not well
Terence P. Jeffrey
When President Obama entered office in January, the greatest problem America faced was neither the war in Afghanistan nor the recession. It was the imminent crisis of the welfare state.
Not only has Mr. Obama failed to deal with this crisis, he is pursuing policies that will bankrupt America.
In March, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, led by former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, calculated the total value of the federal government's "unfunded liabilities" as they stood at the end of fiscal 2008. These liabilities include the publicly held portion of the national debt plus the amount the government must pay to cover all the entitlement benefits it has promised to living Americans through Social Security, Medicare and other welfare-state programs minus the tax revenue the government can expect to collect to pay for these entitlements under existing tax law.
The sum of these unfunded liabilities, the foundation discovered, stood at $56.4 trillion. That equals $435,000 for every full-time worker in the United States.
How did Mr. Obama respond to this problem?
First, he signed a $787 billion stimulus law. Mr. Obama repeatedly claimed this law - which not one member of Congress read in its entirety - was urgently needed to create jobs. In fact, most of the new spending it authorized was for longer-term projects, including creating a national system of electronic health records for every person in America in anticipation of Mr. Obama's plan to nationalize the health care system.
The Government Accountability Office reported last month that at the end of fiscal 2009, 78 percent of the stimulus money remained unspent. But don't worry: Mr. Obama will spend it eventually.
Then, Mr. Obama offered his first federal budget. In 2008, President Bush's last year in office, the federal government spent $2.983 trillion. Under Mr. Obama's plan, according to the Congressional Budget Office, annual federal spending will climb to $4.982 trillion by 2019. In 2008, the federal deficit was a record $459 billion. Over the next decade, Mr. Obama's plan would increase the national debt by a total of $7.137 trillion, running annual deficits averaging $713.7 billion per year.
CBO's estimate of Mr. Obama's new federal debt was based on optimistic assumptions. It assumed low inflation rates, low interest rates and a national economy that grows for 10 straight years after this year without dipping into another recession. It also assumed that the Bush tax cuts would expire as planned after 2010 and income tax rates would rise for middle-class Americans.
The CBO estimate of Mr. Obama's borrowing and spending was also made before Congress finalized drafts of the health care reform legislation that Mr. Obama has pushed as his signature policy proposal.
Mr. Obama has said he would not sign a health care bill that increases the national debt, and when the CBO released its analysis of the Senate health care bill last month it concluded that the bill would actually decrease federal deficits by $130 billion over 10 years.
But that was an illusion.
The key elements of the bill (including federal subsidies to buy health insurance for people making less than 400 percent of the poverty level) do not take effect until 2014 - after Mr. Obama runs for re-election in 2012. As a result, the bill's full cost is not exposed during the initial 10-year time frame that the CBO analyzes when making its official cost estimates.
In fact, according to CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation, the new entitlements in the bill will cost $0 in 2010 (when Congress is up for re-election), $1 billion in 2011, $4 billion in 2012 (when Mr. Obama and Congress are both up for re-election) and $4 billion in 2013. The cost will then balloon to $48 billion in 2014, before rising steadily to $196 billion per year by 2019.
Yet it doesn't end there. The cost of the new health care entitlements will be "growing at about 8 percent per year toward the end of the 10-year budget window," reported CBO. "As a rough approximation, CBO assumes continued growth at about that rate during the following decade."
Do the math: If the bill follows the spending trajectory predicted by the CBO, it will cost $423.13 billion in 2029 and its total 10-year cost from 2020 through 2029 will be $3.07 trillion. Obamacare will cost more in its second decade than the entire federal government cost the year Mr. Obama was elected.
At that price tag, it does not even accomplish the goal of universal health care. "By 2019, CBO and JCT estimate, the number of nonelderly people who are uninsured would be reduced by about 31 million, leaving about 24 million nonelderly residents uninsured (about one-third of whom would be unauthorized immigrants)," says the CBO report.
But if Mr. Obama succeeds in enacting his health care reform, he will move on to his plan for a "comprehensive immigration reform" that will put illegal immigrants on a "pathway to citizenship" - making them eligible for the federal health care entitlement.
If Mr. Obama succeeds, get ready for the crash. It is coming.
Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor in chief of CNSnews.com.
Massive Inflation Has Already Arrived in the U.S.
Posted by Harley in The Economy on September 18, 2009
See my last article, “Proven Business Model Participates In World’s Greatest Transfer of Wealth” and then read the article below relating to the same thing. If interested in learning how you can participate, click on the tag in the my blog header titled “Elite Wealth Plan”.
Article Source: http://www.inflation.us/massiveinflation.html
September 18, 2009
On March 5th with the U.S. Dollar Index at a multiyear high of 89, we wrote an article entitled, “The World is Awashed with Dollars” and said, “It’s a real shame that those who lost most of their money in the stock market and Real Estate bubbles, and are now finally selling out after these markets have already collapsed, are positioning themselves to get wiped out all over again through massive inflation.”
On March 26th we wrote another article entitled, “Don’t Be Last Person Out of the Dollar” and said, “They (the politicians in Washington) will soon learn that you can’t reinflate a bubble as Americans start to wake up and begin pouring their Dollars into real, hard assets like Gold and Silver.”
Since then, the U.S. Dollar Index has fallen practically straight down to a new 52-week low of 76, while gold has risen to a new 18-month high of $1,025.80 per ounce and silver has risen to a new 13-month high of $17.63 per ounce. Meanwhile, several of our gold and silver stock suggestions have gained over 100%.
Ben Bernanke said this week that the recession is “very likely over”. Yes, the recession may be over in nominal terms, but massive inflation has just begun and prices of stocks and real estate will continue to plummet when valued in real money, gold and silver. You can’t just print your way out of a recession without increasing production. Sure, if you print enough money prices of stocks and real estate will rise when priced in dollars, but that won’t mean a thing when it costs $10,000 to fill your refrigerator with food.
We are very happy that Peter Schiff announced on Thursday that he is officially a candidate for U.S. Senate in the State of Connecticut. We are big supporters of Peter Schiff with two of our co-founders each donating $2,400 to his Senate campaign. We are extremely pleased to be hearing from countless NIA members who have also contributed to the campaign. Unfortunately, even if Peter Schiff is elected and s able to help persuade Washington to reverse course immediately, it may still be too late to prevent hyperinflation. Every day that goes by with interest rates at 0%, tremendous damage is being done to our economy that we may never recover from.
China is now beginning to sell yuan-denominated bonds in Hong Kong while encouraging their citizens on state-run television to invest in silver. These moves are quietly positioning China to move away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. When this day comes, all hell will break loose.
In the weeks ahead, we will be launching a new feature on our web site called NIAnswers. It will be a fully interactive section for you to submit to us your questions about the economy and inflation, and search through previous questions and answers that will be categorized in a database. We need to educate America as to how we will feel the pain of the government’s trillions of dollars in wasteful spending so that at the next major tea party protest, we have hundreds of people holding inflation related signs. If Obama’s supporters became aware of what happened in Zimbabwe when Robert Mugabe implemented the same policies that Obama and Bernanke are implementing here, they would see the light and jump to our side.
To view original article see http://www.inflation.us/massiveinflation.html
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