European Nations Start Confiscating Private Retirement Plans!
Posted: January 5th, 2011 | Author: Joe | Filed under: Debt, Retirement | Tags: government, news, Retirement, Saving, social security, welfare state | 1 Comment »What happens when the welfare state begins to collapse, and the government can no longer print its way out of fiscal irresponsibility? Well, in the case of five European nations, you start confiscating the citizens’ savings!
Apparently, the politicians in Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Ireland and France view private savings accounts as their own personal piggy banks. I can’t begin to express how disgusting (and frightening) I think this is.
In Hungry, the government is resulting to extortion to gain access to over $14 billion in individual retirement savings:
“The most striking example is Hungary, where last month the government made the citizens an offer they could not refuse. They could either remit their individual retirement savings to the state, or lose the right to the basic state pension (but still have an obligation to pay contributions for it). “
In Bulgaria, the government seized $60 million in private accounts. The Polish government wants to transfer a “1/3 of future contributions from individual retirement accounts to thestate-run social security system.” Ireland and France are a bit less dramatic in that they have thusfar only raided the public pension funds to bail out the rest of the government, and not yet confiscated any current savings plans.
Beside the outrage of outright theft of private property (i.e. retirement savings) of the Bulgarian, Hungarian and Polish people, even the Irish and French governments raid on public pension plans must lead its citizenry to wonder if there is even any point in saving or planning for the future.
Once the people lose hope and the ability to plan their own destiny, the system collapses.
Could this happen in the United States?
It probably won’t reach the level of depravity of the Hungarian and Bulgarian governments, but the current administration and the 111th Congress racked up record deficits and created the largest new entitlement (heathcare) in generations.. And some have already hinted at back door methods of the kind of confiscation seen in Bulgarian (see how George Miller, Teresa Ghilarducci and the End of Your 401k. ) . And the Social Security “trust fund” has long since been raided, resulting in the system we have today – people paying into the program are essentially supporting those collecting from it today.
I would argue that this is no different than forcing people to pay into the system even though they are not going to benefit from it when they retire. This is likely true for younger generations of worker, though no public official would dare to state this.
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