SoTU: Lies and Grand Larceny

The Bamster's SoTU last night was so hideous I couldn't watch.  Call me a chicken.  Besides, you know it's going to be autopsied a million ways by the morning anyway. 

Being the leader of a Banana Republic who does things by decree executive order instead of by actual, you know, legislation, he has taken the first giant step in the process of confiscation of our 401k accounts, at least according to commentators who have been watching this story over the last several years, like Simon Black.  The MyRA program has been birthed.  Much as Godzilla doesn't look very terrifying the moment he breaks out of his egg, the program doesn't look like much.  The new plans

...will be structured like Roth IRAs; they’ll rely on a new kind of Treasury savings bond that guarantees them against losses; and they’ll have a $15,000 maximum account balance, according to details disclosed by the administration today.

In my first post to this blog in 2010 (after a "Hello World" test post), I talked about this possibility coming, even describing the way they might do it. 

The stock market crash of ’08, with the concomitant collapse of many 401k plans, has given the .gov an excuse. There is talk of nationalizing our 401k plans – in not so few words – so that we can replace those “risky” plans with a gubmint guaranteed (but teeny tiny) yield. ... There's a good reason to think this is coming; our unsustainable debt has to be financed by selling bonds. Now that the sales of bonds are failing internationally, the .gov can sell them by forcing them into our 401k accounts!

In another 2010 post, I suggested they'd do something like the Treasury TIPS bonds.  The MyRA is "A new kind of savings bond" with a "return [that] isn’t exactly world-beating ... 1.47% in 2012, with an average annual return of 3.61% from 2003 through 2012. But the value of the account would never go down."  These sound like the kind of program I've been describing.

The big difference is that getting into the MyRA program isn't mandatory.  Let me just say "not mandatory yet".  This has been discussed in the "halls of power" since before the '08 collapse.  The spending addicts in congress can't resist that pile of money that has been saved. As one commenter over at WRSA said, "but if you think the govt wont take everything you own to keep itself running; you were born last night."

The lies about growing income inequality - as if he was some sort of space alien visiting in DC and not responsible for the crony capitalism that feeds into that - make me gag.  The lie that women make less than men is so common that I scarcely hear it any more.  It's like saying that day care workers don't make as much as oil field roughnecks, so it's due to their sex and not the particular job they're doing.  That idea will never work. 

The pay differences between men and women is studied every year in the trade magazines.  In technical fields, for one area I'm very familiar with, women with comparable experience and seniority earn virtually the same pay as men with the same job title.  The only thing that makes it look like women earn less is that women in engineering tend to be younger, and have less experience in their job title.  In some amount of time - 20 years? - that won't be true any longer.  As of now, there aren't many women in the field comparable in age and experience to us old graybeards and none where I work.