Hamilton “Tony” James, current serves as the president of Blackstone Group. It is the largest money manager in the world with assets totaling 4.65 trillion dollars. Rumors are that he is going to be Hillary’s Secretary of the treasury. He has an interesting idea on 401k plans. He says they are broken and the only way to fix them is by letting government take over. I mean they did so well with Social Security. When LBJ was president, he wanted to hide the true cost of the Viet Nam war. He then had the Social Security money placed in the general fund.
Once the money was in the general fund, he could spend that money on anything he wanted and the money was replaced with Special Issues of the Treasury. Many people think these IOUs are like government bonds but they aren’t. They are merely promises of repayment. And how much are the IOUs allegedly worth? 2.7 trillion dollars. Unless we print a boatload of money and collapse the dollar, the government just can’t pay it back.
What James is proposing is that the entire 25 trillion in private pensions be turned over to the government for safe keeping. From that point on an additional three percent will be withheld from your check and placed into the fund in your name. Your employer will also have to ante up. He has been working on the idea with Teresa Ghilarducci, with the far left wing Economic Policy Institute, who just happens to receive funding from The Open Society Foundation, a George Soros group. There is an exception. Union members can keep their money in their current pension plan. Democrats can’t afford to anger the unions but you they can screw all day long.
From Breitbart
Both James and Ghilarducci justify their grab of most of Americans’ retirement cash by claiming that the middle class will be “all but decimated” in retirement as a direct result of the current “broken” IRA system. They promise their mandatory participation savings will be guaranteed to “earn” the federal government’s “official inflation rate,” plus 3 percent.
But as Ed Butowsky who publishes the closely watched Chapwood Index comments, there are many ways that the promised financial return can be stealthily diverted back into government and private hands.
For example, the 126-year-old Consumer Price Index (CPI) serves as the government’s “official inflation rate.” It was quietly adjusted in 1983 and again in 1995/96 by government officials to exclude items such as taxes, energy, and food. Butowsky points out that the motivation for the “reconfigurations” was understate the “real” inflation rate in order to reduce the explosive rise in the indexed cost of government spending on Social Security and entitlements.
And exactly who would handle this money? Because of it’s size, there are only a few companies able to handle that much cash. The Blackstone Group and Goldman Sachs would be the main two players. Assuming for a moment they charge a measly 1% a year for their work, it amounts to 250 billion dollars a year the first year and increases every year after that.
So, Hillary Clinton, Goldman Sachs, George Soros and Blackstone. What could possibly go wrong with that?