Part IV. – A Tollbooth Every 1/10th Mile, Opening the ETI Expressway (Commentary Summary)
The Democratic platform includes defense the “Fiduciary Rule.” (The roadblocks for small investors on the side roads will remain in place.) It endorses a financial transaction tax. (Image a tollbooth every 1/10th mile if you invest using the main street.) ETIs have been re-opened. (The only thing remaining would be to build an on-ramp to the ETI expressway and to redirect traffic. I doubt that there would be any exit ramps. Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll take the back roads.)
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Part IV. – A Tollbooth Every 1/10th Mile, Opening the ETI Expressway
“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
Obama built this. He has erected new obstacles that will make it far more difficult and more costly for individuals and small businesses to save for retirement on their own. And, there is to be increased scrutiny of small business 401(k) plans.
Hillary Clinton has stated that she intends to build on Obama’s accomplishments. Toward what?
The Democratic platform already includes defense of the “Fiduciary Rule” as one of their planks. It also endorses a financial transaction tax, that will also further adversely affect IRAs and 401(k) plans.
Should Hillary be elected, now that ETIs have been re-opened, she may even resurrect, reconfigure and re-brand the “Rebuild America Fund”, but within the confines under the “Obama strategy” to the narrower focus on individuals, small businesses and their retirement accounts. I fear that the GOPe would capitulate on this matter within those limits.
They might as well call it the “Pension Protection and Affordable Retirement Act”, all with mandatory provisions, federal exchanges, and internally subsidized benefits. They just might do that. After all, individuals and small business owners are just too stupid to invest on their own for retirement.
“Your last drop? Thank you, I don’t ask as much as that … yet.”
Beginning with Carter, and continuing under Obama, the Left have implemented policies that first impacted the housing market and later healthcare, both with disastrous results. Now they are aiming to take a “small bite” out of private retirement plans … yet …
Will it ever end? Regrettably, I think not. A liberal / progressive / socialistic ideology is simply incompatible . . . and insatiable . . . with individualism, libertarianism and/or conservatism.
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Closing Comment:
The purpose of this essay was to take you on a tortuous and perilous road trip through the government’s bureaucratic labyrinth. It was to visit some of the various agencies and view their regulations, bulletins, forms and other non-democratic processes by which we are ruled. It was to show how their decisions intersect with one another, and how pure politics plays into this process.
During this journey I have provided mere snapshots of how these policy decisions impact just one small area of interest, that of private retirement plans. There’s a much larger landscape (political objective) in the background.
Here’s one more snapshot view from the Left as presented in the 1995 Cato Policy Analysis (with emphasis added):
A more effective, albeit more drastic, structural reform would be for states to switch from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans. The change would transfer pension assets from fund board to individual employee control. By eliminating the state’s direct ownership of fund assets, the opportunity to apply damaging political pressure on decisions concerning those assets is diminished, if not eliminated.[105]
In other words, the Left could implement their policies by shifting their focus to a different type of retirement plan, one that is under individual control . . . individuals are stupid . . . and then seize control themselves.
Obama and his administration have exploited this aspect to their advantage and have shifted their focus to an even smaller, more vulnerable segment of private retirement plan assets – individual IRAs and small business 401(k) plans.
Despite the Left projecting their image as middle class champions, as proclaimed by their rhetoric of fighting those big, rich, evil, greedy, corporate 1% “Wall Street” types, it is betrayed by the realities of their policies. They have betrayed the middle class. They are constructing a network of highways and byways to “transform” and to transport the middle class into a working/dependent class necessary to keep themselves in power. This, after all, is what they desire most. This essay was intended to expose that hypocrisy. Their policy decisions have and will have a direct impact on individuals IRAs and small businesses 401(k) plans. “This is all part of the calculus,” as Obama might say.
Winston Churchill once said, “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.”
Obama and his administration have engaged in the “Politics of Envy.” Their strategy is one of divisiveness – of pitting one slightly lower class against the next higher class, of confiscating the assets of the latter and of eliminating that class – this is the essence of “dekulakization” under a socialistic regime, otherwise known as “class warfare.”
We are on the wrong road, but I hope you have enjoyed the trip and came away more enlightened.
