Karen McMahan, a contributing editor of Carolina Journal wrote a very interesting article on November 4th. A few highlights are below.
RALEIGH – Democrats in the U.S. House have been conducting hearings on proposals to confiscate workers’ personal retirement accounts – including 401(k)s and IRAs – and convert them to accounts managed by the Social Security Administration.
Testifying for the House Committee on Education and Labor, Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economic policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York, proposed that the government eliminate tax breaks for 401(k) and similar retirement accounts, such as IRAs, and confiscate workers’ retirement plan accounts and convert them to universal Guaranteed Retirement Accounts (GRAs) managed by the Social Security Administration.
The majority of witness testimony during recent hearings before the House Committee on Education and Labor showed that congressional Democrats intend to address income and wealth inequality through redistribution.
On July 31, 2008, Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, testified before the subcommittee on workforce protections that “from the standpoint of equal treatment of people with different incomes, there is a fundamental flaw” in tax code incentives because they are “provided in the form of deductions, exemptions, and exclusions rather than in the form of refundable tax credits.”
Even people who don’t pay taxes should get money from the government, paid for by higher-income Americans, he said. “There is no obvious reason why lower-income taxpayers or people who do not file income taxes should get smaller incentives (or no tax incentives at all),” Greenstein said.
If you would like to read this entire article, go to: http://www.carolinajournal.com/articles/display_story.html?id=5081
One Man\'s Thoughts 