Posted on 01/06/2011 6:59:04 AM PST by Kaslin
Social Security: Europe is trying to dig out of its budget hole by seizing private pensions. It's a last-ditch effort to preserve socialism at the expense of the very assets that would sustain its future growth.
In Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Ireland and France, big government, a demographic death spiral and weak tax revenues have left fiscal coffers in trouble. Unwilling to stand up to voters — or rioters — most governments have little taste for doing the right thing: cutting their budgets.
So, they're going after pensions to make up for shortfalls. Public and private pensions co-exist in European countries. In some cases, public ones resemble our own Social Security, stressing budgets.
But instead of privatizing pensions, as Chile did in 1980 — which would have turned these obligations into assets — three former stars of European emerging markets have come up with heavy-handed incentives to turn private savings public. It's a step backward.
In November, Hungary's parliament ordered its nationals to fork over $14 billion in private pensions to the state, effectively nullifying the country's 1997 pension reform. Anyone who balks loses his right to a public pension, but not his obligation to pay into it anyway.
Bulgaria's parliament named its price first — $300 million — and told workers to pay that from private savings or else. The Christian Science Monitor notes that had trade unions not protested it, the amount would have been five times larger. But they still lost.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
When it happens here it will be sold as a benefit, a protection to workers to “guarantee” their pensions against the “casino of Wall Street”. And frankly, once it has happened in enough places, nobody will have enough confidence that ANY government will leave their private retirement accounts alone to bother investing in them in the first place.
And some people wonder why Americans don’t save. It’s quite obvious that there is a growing number of fellow Americans who have no compunction about taking private property by force, for the common good of course.
Why should Americans save, when they have to report the measly interest they accrue to the IRS? It’s just not worth it
Will there be enough warning to be able to pull 401k $$$ out?
After long reflection I have come to the conclusion that government is simply large scale organized crime.
How old are you? I came to the same conclusion about 20 years ago.
sfl
“I have come to the conclusion that government is simply large scale organized crime.”
Murray Rothbard pointed this out 4 decades ago:
“only libertarians are prepared to call taxation what it is: legalized and organized theft on a grand scale.”
http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp
Of course, Lysander Spooner figured this out more than 100 years ago:
http://a.hugetiger.com/AO/OCT26-2000/Tax/Tax_is_Theft_Lysander_Spooner_1808-1887.htm
What’s sad is that this sets up all these people to rely even MORE on government when they’re old and cannot work. What a short-sighted decision. I see something similar happening here with individuals who have been out of work for months and even years and have to dip into their savings and retirement funds. They will likely never be able to make up what they have to take out.
It’s already been setup by Odumbo — Code Name “Inflation”
as Chile did in 1980
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