Obama goes after Retirement accounts: Whats the real story

A recent story that just came out stated that the Obama Administration wants to limit how much money one can put into their tax-preferred retirement plans each year.

Now the main difference between say a traditional 401k and an IRA is that 401k’s allow you to put money into them, which you are not taxed on, but when you pull it out you are taxed on it then, while IRA’s tax the money now, but when you pull it out whatever you have made is Tax Free.  Personally I like Self Directed IRA’s in which I am in control of and I put TAXED money into, so 30 years from now (if the money is still there) I can pull out however much i want and not have to worry about Uncle Sam.

What President Obama wants to do is to go after the “ultra-rich” who put away A LOT into these accounts, paying the taxes THIS year but reaping tax free cash years into the future.  Whats the problem? they are paying the taxes on that money now, what the government wants right?  Well apparently you can actually save TOO MUCH and according to a press release from the Administration…

“Under current rules, some wealthy individuals are able to accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.”

What they are saying is that “Well some of these guys save so much that they will be able to retire with a lot of money, well in our opinion that’s too much money to retire on, we don’t like it, so we want to stop them from saving for the future.”

Now for the average Joe like me and You this isn’t a big deal right?  Screw those rich bastards right!

Well personally I have no problem with people making money, if they want to save it and retire on it, that’s their business and whenever someone talks about another person making or having “too much money” that’s just plain old jealousy, because I would love to retire on 500k a year if i could, probably wont! but hey who am I to be jealous of someone that does.

The other thing is that, they administration used the words “more than is needed to fund reasonable levels”  so whats a “reasonable” number for retirement? 200k, 100k 50k?  no one, knows because they leave that up to your imagination to figure out what you would consider reasonable then compare it to what the rich folks will retire on, so you can get angry.

How does this affect you?

Well Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, George Soros, etc. having millions in retirement…doesn’t effect you a bit…you aren’t poorer if they have more and in fact them investing more only helps the economy and the sectors they invest their retirement in, but hey I’m just a dumb Marine right….

How will this decision effect you?  Well this isn’t law, just an opening gambit into controlling the biggest and last golden egg left in the United States…Retirement savings.  Yes there are TRILLIONS of dollars in Retirement savings accounts and that is a FAT BEAUTIFUL PIG the government wants to put on the grill and dine on until its gone.  They are running out of options at this point. States are considering Precious metals as legal tender (yes i know its mostly bluster at this point, but it is a foundation for the future economy in a more fragment ‘union’), foreign buyers of Treasury bonds are drying up and the Fed is buying more and more bonds with made up money every quarter.

This is what happens every time…the government stokes populist anger against the rich about something, like taxes a year ago…”Hey this isn’t going to affect you only the super rich so be angry lets get their money!” People say ” YAY SCREW THOSE RICH BASTARDS” and then what happens, they end up raising your taxes as well right?  Think obamacare and how much more you paid in taxes every paycheck and just this last tax year.  What will happen if this goes through is it will be a template, and sooner than later the number of what is “reasonable” will creep down, until you are forced into certain programs, i.e. ones that buy U.S. government Bonds as part of the portfolio and ones that have you pay taxes ON BOTH ENDS.

This isn’t about the rich, this is about ALL RETIREMENT.

I wrote a post back in February about how the Government was going to start going after our retirement…guess i wasn’t to far off!