How right you are!!! Didn’t Rahm Emanuel, President O’s chief of staff, say “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” After reading some of the bovine ejectus in the Cap & Trade, why would anyone doubt the guv’ment taking over your 401k for “regulatory” or some other reason is out of the question?

I did find this, however, at FactCheck.org. I have no idea if FactCheck.org can be trusted or not, but it’s all I could find. http://www.factcheck.org/askfa.....g_ira.html

The Obama administration is saddling us with massive debt and is definitely pushing us towards socialism and fascism. There are enough valid reasons to complain about this administration without repeating rumors that don’t appear to be based on facts.

I’m not a financial expert, but I can’t see paying a 10% penalty for withdrawing my money out of retirement savings soley based on a rumor such as this. A better reason to do so would be if you fear that the market will tank again and you will need your money before it has time to recover.

Re “Silver, yes, MREs, no! I applaud and agree with the succinct (something I am only rarely) sentiment, but there are much more satisfying ways to solve the problem of “What’s for dinner when we go back to the Dark Ages or at least the anti-Industrial Revolution?” for those of us with sybaritic urges.” — if you recall the famine in east Africa some years ago, MRE == “Meals Rejected by Ethiopians”

Re “Do you have any links which validate the concern of government confiscation of deferred tax accounts?” — while Mme Traynham can speak for herself, consider the following data, in order of importance (IMHO):

1. There is precedent for this: Argentina did it a year or two ago (NOT during the first peso crisis which resulted in a revolving-door presidency, but during ‘the latest crisis’). Bonus: one might note some similarities between the presidents here and there.

2. There is a *lot* of money tied up in these retirement vehicles. I don’t think it’s enough to actually paper over all the cracks in the current tottering edifice of finance, but it would go a long way towards that.

3. Probably most importantly, there already are .GOV strings tying these vehicles up. It would be much easier to “make some small adjustments to help out the economy” than to explore more obviously unexplored territory such as messing around with the ownership of real estate. Or… “what the government gives, the government can take away”.

There are a number of ways in which such confiscation of investment vehicles would be a Very Bad Idea, but the ones that come to mind can all be surmounted by an emergency of sufficient magnitude. I’ll leave that exposition to someone with more interest.

Horace

We’ve far surpassed the hording of Silver and Gold…the only the commodity that will mean anything after the collapse will be Lead…in cased in Brass