Europe - Governments Seize Private Pensions To Cover Budget Shortfalls

As you know by now, the aim of President Barack Hussein Obama and his Democrat allies, among other things, is to transform America into a European style welfare state, AKA 'a Social Democracy'.

Ironically, that's happening at the same time some European governments are realizing what a horrendous idea that was in the first place and are having to take unprecedented measures to stay afloat.

One of those measures, for some countries, involves essentially stealing private pension funds in order to pave over budget shortfalls.

In Hungary for instance, the government told its citizens that they could either turn over Their individual retirement savings ( estimated at about $14 million) to the state, or lose the right to the basic state pension while still having to pay contributions for it.

Bulgaria did something similar, trying to transfer $300 million of private early retirement savings to the state pension fund. The government backed down after the unions protested, but still instituted a partial plan.


In Ireland, the government simply 'borrowed' 4 billion Euros from the National Pension Reserve Fund to rescue the country's banks..and last November, the remaining 2.5 billion in the fund was seized as part of the EU bailout.

France took a different route, using an old accounting trick to get access to the private pensions..the one called robbing Peter to pay Paul. In November, the French parliament decided to use 33 billion Euros from the national reserve pension fund FRR to reduce the short-term pension deficit. That allows the long term retirement savings intended for the years 2020-2040 will be used earlier for the years 2011-2024. Which of course means that the French government can spend the saved up resources on other purposes now and will let 2020 take care of itself...when it will be another French government's problem!

Lest you delude yourselves that this is going to be confined to the antics of foreigners across the pond, rest assured that President Obama and his political soulmates are eagerly taking notes, which is why we heard noises earlier about an American Value Added Tax (VAT), something that has politicians literally drooling at the prospect of automatically stealing millions of your hard earned dollars without the necessity of having to take any responsibility for raising taxes at election time.

And they have an additional wedge here in the US for grabbing onto your pension funds. Some of the EU government pension funds actually had money in them. But in the US, ever since Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats first allowed the Social Security trust fund to be accessed to pay for the War on Poverty,that money has been treated as general revenue and is now essentially one huge IOU backed by government paper.

A government grab of private pensions could be sold as necessary to lower the deficit, or to keep old people from starving or going without healthcare because Social Security and Medicare are bankrupt. And of course, the Federal government's poor management, spendthrift ways and outright theft will never be mentioned.

Some of the states, especially the Blue ones with huge unfunded public employee union pension mandates would absolutely adore this as well, since it would get them off the hook and be a bailout without actually having the odor of one.The only people to really get hit would be the ones who took these jobs in the first place with the idea that the money being put aside would actually go to fund their retirement.

Suckers.

Besides, after all, we have to spread the wealth around just like Chairman Obama said, don't we?

Watch carefully what's going on in DC-land. And if and when this comes up, be prepared to scream bloody murder at your representatives in Congress.

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Why There's Nothing Wrong With Feeding Schoolkids Dinner

This story created a mild ripple in the blogosphere, and led to an interesting online discussion with some of my favorite conservatives.

It concerns a program instituted by the DC public schools to serve dinner at school.

The District of Columbia has joined 13 states which serve three meals a day at school, as part of a $5.7 million Federally Funded program.
“We're reaching 10,000 kids a day at 99 of our 120 schools," said Anthony Tata, Chief Operating Officer of D.C. Public Schools.

Public school officials claim, quite correctly, that healthy, well-fed kids learn better, and are less prone to be discipline problems. And the after school dinners also have more kids enrolling in the after school programs - where they have the opportunity to spend more time on schoolwork.

A lot of my conservative friends were outraged at the dependency and what they saw as Big Government doing something these children's parents should be doing...at the taxpayer's expense. One of them came up with the entirely correct insight that as the school system takes over more and more of the functions of family, more and more families stop functioning.

I understand that viewpoint, but I differ in this particular instance.

Assuming the kids' families qualify financially ( and I'm sure a lot of these programs need much more oversight to weed out the grifters from the truly needy) I see nothing wrong with feeding them. The article correctly states that otherwise, a lot of these kids in the after school program probably wouldn't get any food until breakfast at school the next day.

Kids with a meal under their belts do learn better, are easier to discipline and approach school with a much better attitude. The problem with the DC schools (which are near the bottom results wise and near the top in dollars spent per pupil) is the top heavy and largely incompetent administration, a lack of fiscal discipline and the teacher's union protection of incompetent teachers. I don't agree that the kids should suffer because of that just to make a point.

Vouchers are the answer,but Obama helped kill DC's voucher program - while sending his own kids to an exclusive private school.

Given the racial composition of DC's public schools,it's a pretty safe bet that the majority of these kids are coming from one parent households, with the luckier ones being raised by grandpa and grandma. There's also a culture problem when it comes to school if we're willing to be honest about it, and it is NOT a racial problem by the way - Barbados, for example is a black country that spends a fraction of what DC does per pupil with much better educational results.

One of my friends made the observation that the real cultural problem is the development of a culture of dependency. He's right, it definitely is, and it's the fruits of decades of Big Government.

But this is a cultural problem that definitely isn't going to be addressed at the home level, because of political correctness. Gut the program? Stop feeding the kids and tell their parents to do it? Fine..a lot of them will end up going hungry, get involved in crime, drugs or prostitution and just perpetuate the cycle.

Take the kids away from their dysfunctional 'families'? Then they're either in orphanages or foster homes, which costs even more and creates other problems with oversight.

Bottom line, it would be nice if more people would refrain from bringing kids into the world with the expectation that someone else is going to pay to support them. But they aren't. They'll still breed.

So we can ignore the problem as not ours, or try and fix it.

My point is that the public schools, properly managed could be a tool to instill some different values and break the cultural cycle.The fact that they by and large aren't being used like that now and are just functioning as madrassahs for the Left and sources to siphon off public monies for political contributions to the Democrats via the unions is another matter.

Back in previous generations,a large part of the entire rationale for public schools was to teach values, patriotism and citizenship as well as things like math and English. I think that unfortunately pretty much ended in the days after WWII,when teaching became just another union gig.

But if schools started instilling those values again and started creating citizens rather than statistics,if tax paying public saw that the school budgets were being used wisely and were more convinced that they were actually receiving value,there would be less of a call for vouchers and they'd likely be a lot more amenable to spending the money.

Your thoughts?

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