War on Boomers

[jms62]

Sobering. Frankly I am a bit short of 200 Mil


http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/...-baby-boomers/

[Riot]

It is sobering. I remember when basic savings accounts paid 5.25% interest. I'd love to be able to get that nowadays.

It used to be that the three pillars of retirement were that you saved, you had your lifetime work/job pension, and you had Social Security/Medicare to fill in the cracks.

That's all been taken by lawmakers over the past 30 years. Pensions for union workers have been discarded. Pensions for government workers have been discarded. Wall Street rules have been altered so a small investor has losses of their small capital investment due to fees over time. And they are trying to get their hands on the money left in Social Security and Medicare now, to privatize that.

It's really quite amazing, the theft of the middle classes money, that's happened over the past decades. The majority of money in the United States is in the hands of a wealthy few - there is no middle class left, really.

You need Romney Retirement Math: Take an IRA that is limited to deposits of $2000 year, but suddenly it's magically worth millions if you are Romney.

When Romney was running Bain Capital and building up his IRA, the maximum annual contribution permitted by the tax code was $2,000. So how did Romney’s IRA get to be worth between $20 million and $101 million? He won’t say. It’s possible that he rolled over some money that was originally in a 401(k) retirement plan of the kind offered by many employers. But annual 401(k) contributions were then capped at $30,000, including an employer match — in Romney’s world, chump change.

Analysts surmise that Romney may have placed his interests in various Bain investment partnerships in the IRA, taking advantage of Internal Revenue Service rules that allow these interests to be undervalued for IRA purposes. In some cases they can even be valued at zero, since partnership interests represent future income, not present income, and …

OK, I know I’m losing you here — I’m in danger of losing myself — but you get the point. Individual retirement accounts were created as a way for middle-class Americans to save some tax-deferred money for their senior years. It isn’t clear exactly what Romney is using his gargantuan IRA for, but it’s certainly not what Congress intended.

http://www.tallahassee.com/article/2...ay-an-obstacle