All Your 401(k)s Are Belong To Us!
Joe Biden waited twenty-six months to issue his first veto. Granted, he had a Democratic Congress the first twenty-four, so it's not that big a shock it took so long, and given that Congress does everything these days in giant omnibus bills that the White House helps craft, the surprise it took so long diminishes further. And, that the bill barely squeaked through Congress in the first place, with two Democrats in the Senate crossing the aisle to joining Republicans to eke out a 50-46 margin, reduces the veto to "shocked face" sarcasm.
What did Joe veto? A Congressional revocation of a rule issued by the Labor department that called for retirement fund managers to consider environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) issues when managing Other People's Money. Normally, one would expect those people to act in the fiduciary interest of the investors, i.e. to maximize return within certain risk parameters. It's a reality that introducing any other guiding parameter into the equation will result in poorer returns, so this move by the Biden administration will cost millions of people across the country money.
Why do this? Why hurt people's private retirement funds, especially with the Social Security time bomb ticking ever more loudly?
The tipoff is initial-capped in the previous paragraph.
My perpetual plaint.
Many have speculated that the government will get around to coming after people's retirement savings at some point, given its endless rapacity for spending and the ever-growing debt it's piling on America's future generations. There's nearly $40T held in various retirement vehicles in America as of 2021, and that giant pile of scratch has to be incredibly tempting to Washington's hogs at the trough.
The problem, to paraphrase Hedley Lamarr, is the rightful owners. But, what if the government could use all that money without having to take possession of it? After all, using OPM, not simply stuffing it into its mattress, is what government is all about. So, since a whole lot of that $40T is being managed by third parties, why not force those third parties to deploy it in ways that please the government?
Already, we have the problem of state comptrollers deploying hundred-billion-dollar public pension funds for political purposes. Which, as I noted earlier, is bound to reduce rates of return. Now, Biden told the private sector that it needs to do the same. So, ESG garbage gets funded by your retirement funds, not only depriving you of control over your money, but costing you money as well.
Day in and day out, our public servants continue to expose their contempt for us, the people they purportedly serve. That contempt is abetted by the voters who put them in office, voters that have decided it's not only OK, but actually proper to covet OPM, and who have less and less compunction about using force to take the fruit of others' labor.
When people decide it's OK to steal, their preferred politicians are freer to grab whatever they can, and to write law that grants them ever more power to do so.
This won't end with mere "guidance" as to how your money should be invested. Unless you finally tell them to bugger off your next trip to the ballot box.
Those of a certain age and nerdiness will catch the title’s reference. The rest can click here for illumination.
the “fair share!”
If I thot an election might change the course of our criminal public servants, I'd have hope. But how many election cycles are needed to remove enough of the criminal lot to make any difference, while replacing them with unswerving law-abiding honest ones? Finding honest replacements is, in itself, a tall order. The entire system is entrenched with corrupt control. This has been the case for Many years and that doesn't unwind with an election.