Mark Levin interviewed Professor Teresa Ghilarducci whose plan for the U.S. government to take over private pension plans to “protect retirees” is being touted by Congressman Barney Frank. This interview will go down as classic Mark Levin. (She is voting for Barack Obama. Go figure).
“You pick your crooks,” Dr. Ghilarducci said. No ma’am; we elect them.
Mark got it right. This scheme infuses funds into Social Security, with fear during the current shakey stock market as the motivator. Yet if you think about what Dr. Ghilarducci said during an earlier interview, you realize it creates an even bigger unfunded government liability for future generations to pay, sort of a double-down on Social Security.
Q: Is there any chance the federal government might take over private pension plans to protect retirees, as Argentina is considering?
A: Some in Congress have begun discussions about how U.S. workers could be guaranteed more security but still see some growth in their retirement funds. The House Committee on Education and Labor is holding hearings on the issue.
On Oct. 7, they heard testimony from Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor from The New School for Social Research in New York. She proposed a radical, short-term fix, where 401(k) plans would be turned over to a guaranteed retirement account composed of government bonds earning a 3 percent annual return, adjusted for inflation.
When workers begin collecting Social Security, the account would pay them an inflation-adjusted annuity, based on the accumulated funds. For example, a 55-year-old worker with $50,000 in a 401(k) account in August would swap out the $50,000 for a guarantee of $500 per month in retirement.
Q: What about a long-term solution?
A: Chilarducci proposed the creation of universal guaranteed retirement accounts in which the federal government invests $600 for every worker. Workers would put 5 percent of their pay in and the account would earn a guaranteed 3 percent rate of return, plus inflation. The cost of this plan would be offset by doing away with most tax breaks currently offered on 401(k) accounts, so the government wouldn’t have to pay any more than it does now. The accounts would be safer and guarantee all workers an income during retirement.
Q: What are the chances one of these proposals will be implemented?
A: That’s probably not very likely right now — but if they get backed by enough political will, who knows? There certainly is a groundswell of concern over the current system, considering that many workers have lost half of their retirement funds in the stock market.
Something to keep in mind, though: In the current system, trillions of dollars are invested in accounts managed by some very large companies — and they’ll fight any attempt to take away their retirement fund business.
We can’t have businesses making money, being greedy capitalists, not in Barack Obama’s America.
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Dr. Ghilarducci is affable yet foolish. Her plan socializes private pensions for the middle class and kicks an even bigger Social Security can down the same road. 50k at 55 gets you an extra $500 a month at retirment, adjusted for inflation during part one. In part two, you pay extra to get Social Security plus but at a low, fixed rate of growth, backed by the “full faith and credit” of the United States. The government will throw you back a slightly bigger bone (the one your hard work dug up and you faithfully brought to them) and each annual increase for inflation will also likely get sucked up by ever increasing Medicare co-pays. How comforting — not.
Frank and company would love to see that initial rush of converted 401(k’s) come in. They’d run to the nearest microphone and claim, “Look! We saved Social Security!” but Congress would spend those funds now. (’Change’ comes with a hefty price tag). The burden on workers paying for retired baby boomers would accelerate in a few years. When the Social Security and Medicare bubbles burst, they will make the Fannie and Freddie bailout look like chump change.
This chick doesn’t even know how much of a fool she is!!!! Mark is excellent!
I hope that for her sake that her retirement fund isn’t “professionally managed” by professionals like her.
This is a good example of liberal elitistism Brian Williams!
STOP DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY!
Great job Mark.
SS, along with Medicare and Medicaid, has already gotten its bailout package in incremental degrees over the years and is soon going to run against another deadline where it takes in less than what it doles out leaving both its’recipients and lenders fund with a shortfall based on annual receipts. And they will have no excess for the general fund as well. That alone has got to have them real nervous. But why should I worry when the magical virtual trust fund has the full support and backing of the US government? Translated that means that the taxpayer has to bail them out.
Dr. G is just one of the many academics looking to get their name in lights for solving the SS debacle. Imagine that the people who caused the problem now want to rob Paul to pay Paul because Paul and his managers just aren’t doing a good enough job with his 401K. After all the government has over 70 years of SS mismanagement to show how much better they can do. So why not have them confiscate our money by breaking the contracts that we had with them to set up the 401K in the first place? Isn’t this a definition of patriotism? And these are the very same people that criticized the Bush voluntary and very limited plan. Maybe Dr. G should check out Galveston.
Of course Dr. G, safe and secure in her huge, socialistic academic bubble, immune from the real world, is looking for the full force of the US government to seize your retirement savings to cover the governments’ butt for its’ decades of massive reckless spending over and above its’ massive taxes inflicted on American productivity.
Dr. G. you and your ilk live by confiscation. You live in a subsidized world free from the forces of supply and demand. You are an artificial creation of Great Society socialism. You are subsidized up to your neck because even those that pay tuition pay that tuition with Sallie Mae government backed loans and they have an even greater failure rate than the sub primes. In other words much of your existence is paid by the taxpayer and not by choice but by force and I see that you have every intention of providing solutions that continue with that same paradigm. Keep it up and I won’t maintain a retirement plan. I’ll just invest in Africa, specifically Kenya, because, should Obama be victorious, I can expect a good deal of the US taxpayer dollar to subsidize any number of foreign projects that are bound to succeed far better than the US businesses that are bleed out to support them. Possibly that is where Obama plans to invest everyone’s confiscated 401k. Nice try but I think Columbo pretty much got you to say enough for the rest of us to figure out who you are and what you are really about and no one in America will sell your idea to the taxpayer and survive for an additional term in office. Well maybe Barney Frank and Chris Dodd would.
It is incredible that people such as Barney Frank run ads casting him as the solution to the bank failures when anyone with a room temperature IQ knows that he caused it. Likewise it makes me furious to listen to people like Dr. G telling the American public to trust her plan under the auspices of the US government when it is nothing more than an attempt to put out a fire by using an accelerant, such as gasoline.
The spooky part is she is of the same mindset as Barry Obama.
These people are too idealized and narcistic, there is no other common sensical way of doing things. They will never give the other side a chance to be. That is why the push for Palin/McCain (joking, vice-versa please! Hopefully Sarah P has Jedi mind powers!) must be made by us common folks. And in an factual intellectual way please. Don’t be like Team Obama. (And all this from a Hawaii guy?)
I dislike the fact that these lack-of-common-sense unintellectual liberals view 401K plans like how Professor Ghiradelli (no sweetness here) does. These plans are good because they allow private companies to expand with this investment capital creating more jobs and true growth in the economy, i.e. products to sale around the world. Tax money investment doesn’t grow the economy much and that revenue will be taxed too-economic stagnation is a high possibility. And by nature and by rules and regulations, government will always be inefficient. Bad and unfair to have businesses run on tax money and bailed out on tax money to be if governments owned the businesses and industries.
The other part of the Prof’s view of 401K not being taxed but once is bull crap. It’s our money and it was put to good sense. And the so-called high fees being charged to manage them,I think they are fair. Why? We hire them to make money for us via the plan.
One source of these problems these Profs have is they can’t mind their business and they really are trying to justify their being. I say they should quit being profs and try work at a retail store and see what life is really like.
Fight the good fight. It will be 232 years of evolution for something that has so much potential for humanity gone if the O-B ticket wins.
The increasing acceptance of socialism in the United States is related to breakup of the family. People from broken homes look to the government “family” and so called “do-gooder” experts like Dr. G. and Senator B.O. to take care of them as the substitute for the family they never had. Liberals never seem to grow up.
Just a thought.
Absolutely right about the family. When you subsidize bad habits you do not cure them, you create them. Throughout our biological and cultural evolution and history the family has been the core of how we develop and determines much of who we are. Only the government, could destroy the family that played so prominently in our specie’s success, for hundreds of thousand of years, in less than five decades.