April 9, 2013, 8:37 am
A few days ago I wrote:
I would be willing to bet him that within the decade, it will become a mainstream idea in the progressive community to fund shortfalls in Social Security and Medicare with a full or partial seizure of 401K's.
This is not quite there, but it sure shows that they are thinking in this direction
The senior administration official said that wealthy taxpayers can currently “accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.”
Under the plan, a taxpayer’s tax-preferred retirement account, like an IRA, could not finance more than $205,000 per year of retirement – or right around $3 million this year.
Wealth taxes on large pools of savings are not far behind
March 21, 2007, 8:12 pm
Yesterday, I posited that current proposals for government health care are worse than other welfare programs, because they not only will cost a ton of money, but they will also, unlike say government housing, make my personal health care worse.
I only had to wait one day for an example (actually, I didn't have to wait at all, since I could just mine Europe and Canada for examples).
Massachusetts has now set the minimum level of insurance required to
comply with the state's individual mandate. Not only will every
resident of the state be required to have insurance by July of this
year, but by January of 2009, no one in the state will be allowed to
have insurance with more than a $2,000 deductible or total out of
pocket costs of more than $5,000. In addition, every policy in the
state will be required to cover prescription drugs, a move that could
add 5-15 percent to the cost of insurance plans.
After a lot of study, my family chose a high deductible health plan combined with a medical IRA (they actually call them something else, but I can't remember the abbreviation). We had a low deductible plan, but ran the numbers, and found we would save tons with a higher deductible plan, particularly if we dumped the savings into the IRA. We set the deductible at the level of economic pain we thought we could bear in a bad year. Even if we had a medical disaster once every three years, we would still be ahead with the lower premiums and the IRA-style tax savings. And if we don't have a disaster that frequently (we never have had even one in our lives) then we will build up some nice savings for retirement.
Of course, this makes too much sense to be legal. It actually involves individual choice and stuff, and god forbid we be allowed to exercise that. For our own good, of course.
