Leftwing Politicians Want Your Retirement Money

eft-wingers in Washington are looking for ways for the government to seize control of private 401(k) pension plans.

Back in February, a report by Vice President Joseph Biden's White House Task Force on the Middle Class called for government regulations to insulate workers' retirement accounts from "inflation and market risk," meaning they would be placed under federal control and disbursement. And last month, left-wing Sen. Tom Harkin, D-IA, influential chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, along with self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, held a hearing on creating federally-sponsored "guaranteed retirement accounts," or GRAs, an idea being pushed by Theresa Guilarducci, director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis.

The Schwartz Center is part of the New School of Social Research in New York, which was founded in 1919 by socialists and became a haven for Marxist academics fleeing political opposition in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the 1930s.

At the Senate hearing, Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute advocated creation of a "universal system" of government-run pensions and recommended establishing the "supplemental retirement plan" proposed by the Schwartz Center. Eisenbrey said the current system, which provides tax incentives for workers to divert some of their income into individual retirement savings accounts, provides too many benefits for "high income workers" compared to poorer workers.

Coinciding with release of the Biden report, the Departments of Labor and Treasury issued a public "Request for Information" to consider the "annuitization" of private individual 401(k) pension plans. Under "annuitization," the government would control the principal and administer the disbursement of annual payouts.

"The Agencies are considering whether it would be appropriate for them to take future steps to facilitate access to, and use of, lifetime income or other arrangements designed to provide a stream of income after retirement," said the official notice.

Advocates of government GRAs envision a federal scheme that would "nationalize' or take over existing private 401 (k) retirement plans and blend them with a new mandatory payroll tax to set up a federal pension plan in addition to Social Security.

Critics say part of the purpose is to use the money to bailout union pension funds that suffered significant losses in the current economic recession.

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