"In February, the U.S. Department of Labor's Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA), in collaboration with the Department of Treasury, announced a "request for information" to study the Lifetime Income Options for Retirement Plans and asked 'for ideas on how to help reduce the chances that workers will run out of funds during their retirement years.'"
According to the Department of Labor's website this request of information is "not a rule or regulation. It is a pre-rulemaking act by an agency, or in this case two agencies, to collect information and data on a specific topic. This RFI is the starting point for a discussion of whether, or to what extent, the agencies might take some action to address identified problems facing today’s retirees." The purpose of this request for information " is merely a vehicle to engage interested persons in exploring ways that the Agencies and the private sector can work together to ensure that workers have the tools they need to help ensure their retirement savings last a lifetime." And also to "On February 2, 2010, the Department, in conjunction with the Department of the Treasury, published an RFI as a first step towards exploring what steps might be taken to enhance retirement security." So this push for the government taking over retirement accounts will come under the name of security.
The fact is that the government is in massive debt of around 130 trillion dollars. This is larger than the GDP of the world which is fifty seven trillion according to the IMF. The interest alone on the national debt in 2020 will be more than the amount that the U.S. spends on defense and the largest single item in the budget--this is assuming the economy picks back up to where it was previous to the Great Recession. This is why Admiral Mike Mullen, and recently Hillary Clinton, stated that our debt is the biggest threat to our nation's security. And following the article about Obama's anti-colonialism and desire to redistribute America's wealth around the world, having to pay all of this interest to foreign debt holders will do just that and having such a large amount of our debt held by foreigners will help reduce America's sovereignty. (Note that most of the nation's debt is not held by foreigners.) The world's economy is one big bubble. According to the article above, there is about eight trillion dollars out there in retirement accounts. This is a lot of money for the government to pass up considering its level of debt. Of course when the debt becomes a big enough problem, the government will have no choice but to take some of this money under the guise of diverting a "disaster" and providing "security" for our retirement accounts to confiscate them. I would support the government taking over this money to pay down the debt. The fact is that our nation is consuming more than it produces. People want free health care, medicare, social security, GI bill, a military structure that is turning into a welfare system, and a government that can solve all of our problems. One of the short comings of the Tea Party is that no one is willing to touch the social security or the other "sacred cows". People will simply not accept it. Nothing less of a MAJOR change of course will prevent the nation's debt from becoming a very real problem in the coming decade. Well, somebody has to pay for this. So pay up. Not anything to care about at the moment, but something to keep an eye on.
