Quote from: MoonShadow on May 23, 2013, 04:58:21 AM

Quote from: boltactionz on May 23, 2013, 12:20:38 AM

Quote from: MoonShadow on May 22, 2013, 10:10:03 PM

Quote from: boltactionz on May 22, 2013, 09:04:14 PM

Also, if you are in the United States, you know that retirement account you thought you had? Perhaps now would be a good time to cash out and go physical instead of one's and zero's...!

My wife would never let me do any such thing, until the day that I can show her that it's already happening to others, by which time it will probably be too late. The only thing that I can realisticly do is take out a "loan" against it, for which I can only get half of the nominal value and I have to pay back.

The thing to show her is not in the current marketplace in the US, but in the history of what happened in Argentina. This time is NOT different...

You and I know that, but it's really hard to convince a woman that Argentina is a case example comparable to the United States.

Here's something you can point out after you show her the Argentina example for the purpose of demonstrating a trend, that DID happen in the US.

One year there was talk of a budget shortfall, what Timothy Geithner as Treas/Sec proposed and eventually did, was "temporarily borrowed from" the US federal employees' retirement system in order to cover the shortfall. It was a quickie little dip into the funds, and it was supposed to be paid back. Was it? I don't know. But just the fact that a US Treasury shortfall was covered by basically stealing money out of the federal employee pension system should be enough to let the doubters know that they will use whatever means they have to in order to get the job done, up to and including stealing anybody's retirement funds. It was a relatively small amount percentage-wise, but a huge amount if you put it in dollar terms.

And this "little" tidbit was actually in the news, not really buried all that much. It's not like one had to be reading super-obscure private newsletters in order to learn about it because it was on the news, film-at-eleven style for at least a couple of days after they did it.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't wait for it to happen again!

I call that little "dipping into the retirement" trick the Enron run, because one of the reasons the Enron employees lost out so big was because most of their retirement funds were all Enron stock. Because the company imploded due to accounting "irregularities" and cute little off-the-books "count-funny" tricks, the average employee at the company lost everything, not just their jobs. A lot of times when people struggle during a job loss they will dip into their retirement fund if they do not have enough money saved up outside it. But because the company went under, the retirement account was gone, too. (In somewhat related news, Jeffrey Skilling should be just about ready to get out of prison by now if he isn't already on the outside...)

Obama has already been heard to make a comment or two about having "too much tax-free money inside a Roth" and that "we need to change that" and that "three million is enough". To me it sounded like a preparatory statement to get people ready for the eventual retirement account grab. The mention of the cut-off level was just big enough that those who think that is a lot of money will go crazy and say "with all that money they deserve to pay", while anybody who knows reality will say "that's not enough to live on if I have to give the government half of it"! I mean, bank CDs pay what, 1%? At 1%, living off the interest of $3 million is just $30,000 a year. If the government gets their way they'll try to take 35% of that, leaving one with just $19,500.

P.S. I'm a woman, not a man. So don't give up, it's not hard to convince all women out there!