Way, way back, many, many moons ago, I, El Rushbo, told you that the federal government might someday target your 401k.
Huge pile of money.
If you add everybody's 401k plans together, huge pile of money.
Government needs money.
We're deeply in debt.
And they could do any number of things.
They could buy your 401k from you.
In fact, there was a professor, female professor at some Ivy League school, forget her name right now, who had this idea that the government takes your IRA because it really isn't fair.
The government's losing money.
There ought not to be this pre-tax deduction that people get.
You know, the way you fund your 401k is off the top.
You put so much in, tax-free.
It reduces your taxable income.
You get a tax cut.
Teresa Ghilarducci was her name.
And it was just not fair.
It wasn't fair.
The government should have never made that deal.
Because they're really short-changing themselves on tax revenue.
So her plan off top my head was basically to commandeer your 401k and give you the current equivalent amount and then guarantee you, yeah, from the new school in New York.
And they brought her up for hearings and testimony.
They would commandeer your account and then give you the equivalent and then promise you 3% annual increases and so forth.
But bye-bye tax deduction and all of that.
And I remember George Miller, congressman from California, loved the idea because, you know, it was just unfair that the government was not collecting that tax money.
And it was a mistake they made.
It was a good idea when they started it.
Everybody said, oh, yeah, because we weren't saving enough.
And this was an inspiration for people to save.
You get to choose a certain amount of money up to a maximum from your salary paycheck every week that goes to your 401k.
And you don't pay the tax on it until it matures and you start living off of it.
Unless you take it out earlier than you are contracted to, in which case, you face penalties.
Well, from Bloomberg News, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is weighing whether it should take on a role in helping you manage your 401k.
Right now, there's $19 trillion combined in 401ks.
$19 trillion has been put into retirement savings.
And the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau helping you manage that would be a move that would be the agency's first foray into consumer investments.
The director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a guy named Richard Cordray.
And back on January 18th, in an interview, he said, that's one of the things that we've been exploring and we're interested in in terms of whether and what authority we have to help you manage your 401k.
Now, he didn't provide any details, but their core concern at the U.S. Consumer Protection Bureau, Their core concern is that many Americans, notably those of you retiring, baby boom generation people, you might fall prey to financial scams.
This was according to three people briefed on the deliberations.
They asked not to be named because the matter is still under discussion.
The retirement savings business in the U.S. is dominated by a group of companies that handle record keeping and management of investments in the 401k plans and IRAs.
The group includes Fidelity Investments, J.P. Morgan Chase, Charles Schwab, the others.
The Security and Exchange Commission and the Department of Labor are the main regulators of U.S. retirement savings vehicles and the money.
However, the Consumer Bureau, established by the Dodd-Frank Act, sees itself as a potential catalyst for promoting a coherent policy across the government.
Now, I'm going to tell you what this is a forerunner to.
This Consumer Bureau, set up by Dodd-Frank, wants to claim jurisdiction over 401ks.
They want to claim jurisdiction through the Office for Older Americans.
There actually is a bureaucracy called that.
The Office for Older Americans, also established by Dodd-Frank, it has a mandate to help improve financial literacy.
It is run by Hubert Humphrey III, ranking member of the ruling class, and a former Attorney General Minnesota and either the grandson or great-grandson of former Democrat presidential candidate.
So when you add Teresa Ghilarducci the new school and her plan for IRAs and now 401ks, and then you realize there's $19 trillion there, and we're running a national debt of $17 trillion.
You add to that the fact the government thinks that they screwed themselves when they created IRAs and 401ks in the first place.
You can see where this might be headed going, put it that way.
That money may not be yours at some point down the road because the government screwed themselves and they should have never done this.
And they need money.
And this is not the first time this has come up.
The Reverend Jackson, you know, has made a big push for pension money.
As all that money could be used for redistribution.
So I'm telling you, you got some money saved up in an IRA or a 401k.
I just want that nothing imminent here, but telltale signs.
They're right there on the horizon.
And this bunch is cash-drafted.
We also have a regime who thinks that you don't know what to do with your money.
We have a regime and a Democrat Party that thinks you don't know what to do with your guns.
You're not the best person to be in charge of your life.
You're not really qualified to make the best decisions for you and your family.
And they are.
And they are total statists.
They believe in the government running everything.
They believe in your incompetence to manage your own affairs.
Speaking of which, I've got a story here.
I know it's in the stack someplace.
Somebody has uncovered something.
Secret memo or something indicating that Obama, ha ha, here it is.
Lo and behold, I put it at the top.
Here we go.
Listen to this.
This is from the AP, and they're mad about this.
The NRA has found a Justice Department memo, and they are using it to accuse the Obama administration of wanting to commandeer your guns.
They are furious here, this AP story.
The National Rifle Association using a Justice Department memo that it obtained to argue in ads that the Obama regime believes its gun control plans will not work unless the government seizes firearms and requires national gun registration.
Now, when everybody makes that accusation, what happens?
If you, for example, say the regime wants to take your guns, there are cat calls of protest, howls of protest, and you were accused of being a conspiracy kook, and they say, you know, nobody's ever suggested that.
Who are you talking?
Nobody wants to take your guns.
Like, it's even happened to me.
What happened is the NRA managed to get their hands on a DOJ Department of Justice memo that undercuts all of these claims that the regime does not want to get hold of your guns.
And the AP makes it clear the only way Obama will get what he wants is through registration and eventually banning guns.
That's what the memo says.
The NRA has found it.
The AP is furious at the NRA for having found the memo and using it now.
The AP even says, quote, the NRA's obtaining of the memo in the first place underscores the no holds barred battle underway as Washington's fight over gun restrictions heats up now.
Isn't this what American journalists used to do before the work began to exclusively represent the Democrat Party?
It used to be that if memos like this existed, if there were a secret memo that basically said the purpose of gun registration was to eventually be able to ban them, if there was such a memo to be, wouldn't the media be the ones to find that memo and wouldn't the media win a puliser for doing so?
Speaking truth to power and all of that gibberish?
Well, now it doesn't work that way anymore.
The media helps regimes hide such memos.
The NRA got its hand on the memo and now the NRA is the bad guy.
The AP is outraged that this crime researcher had the temerity to question Obama on his gun proposals.
And never mind that this crime researcher at the NRA is actually the acting director of the National Institute of Justice.
That's the Department of Justice research arm.
He'd previously been with the RAND Corporation.
He studied criminal justice issues.
He's got a PhD in statistics.
This guy found the memo.
The AP is essentially saying, who the hell is this guy to question Obama's expertise on guns?
Who is this guy to question Obama's expertise on crime?
Because Obama's the expert in everything.
He's the expert on health care.
He's the expert on jobs.
He's the expert on drugs.
He's the expert on manufacturing and selling them.
He's the expert on everything.
Nobody in any of these industries knows anything compared to what Obama knows.
And nobody in these industries cares as much as Obama does.
He's the expert on health care.
He's the expert on health insurance.
He's the expert on hospitals and how to run them.
He's the expert in determining who should get treated medically and who shouldn't be.
Now, the point is, the NRA has this crime researcher that found this memo.
And the memo undercuts all of Obama's claims.
The memo makes it clear that the only way the government will get what they want is through registration and eventually banning guns.
It's a memo that spells out current policy about guns.
And the policy is X.
And what the memo points out is the only way to get to X is to take people's guns from them.
And you start by registering every damn one of them.
The memo simply, it's one of these internal memos, say government bureaucrat says, look, we eventually want to make having a gun illegal.
How do we do it with the Second Amendment?
So a bunch of guys get down and start writing a memo.
Okay, if that's really what you want to do, here's how you would have to do it given the Constitution, the Second Amendment.
That's what was found.
It's a theoretical memo.
It's not a policy memo yet.
It's just a theoretical memo that somebody asked to put together a policy.
And what the memo makes clear is that the only way that Obama can get what he wants or that the government can get what they want regarding guns is massive full-fledged registration and the eventual banning of guns.
I want to be very clear about this.
Nobody has proposed banning guns.
What has happened is somebody at the regime said to somebody else, what do we have to do to get to point A or X?
And so these big thinkers accept the assignment.
They look at it and they say, if you really want to get to X, the only way you can get there to have that policy is total registration, but you're eventually going to have to ban guns.
It's the only way you can affect what you want is to ban guns.
That is what's been discovered, and that's what the NRA is using.
And the NRA is being very careful.
They're not accusing anybody of having this policy.
All they're saying is that there exists a memo explaining if that's your objective, this is how you do it.
Not that they've put anything into motion yet.
And this undercuts the idea, you know, when the regimes, we're not even thinking about banning guns.
They are thinking about it.
That's about all they're doing.
But it is something that is in a memo under consideration, maybe seriously, unseriously.
But the point is it's being thought of, thought about.
And the AP is furious that the NRA found the memo.
Because according to the AP, they're misusing it.
They're stating it's applicable in ways that it isn't.
And that's not what the NRA is doing.
The NRA is simply doing what I just did.
The NRA is pointing out: hey, look, there's some people in government who are tinkering with how to get to point A on a policy.
And here's what they would have to do to do it.
Justice Department official called the memo an unfinished review of gun violence research.
Said it doesn't represent policy.
I'm sure it doesn't yet.
Memo says requiring background checks for more gun purchases could help, but also could lead to more illicit weapon sales.
It says banning assault weapons and high-capacity ammo magazines produced in the future, but exempting those already owned by the cops would have limited impact because people now own so many of them.
So it comes up with ways around that.
It'd be like John F. Kennedy says, I need to get to the moon in 10 years.
So a bunch of people, NASA, put together the plan.
This is what we would have to do.
That's all that's happened.
Don't anybody misunderstand.
The point is, the memo exists.
The AP tried to suppress it along with the rest of the media.
The NRA hated and reviled, found it.
And so now the NRA is the problem, not the regime.
And we will be back.
Don't go away.
Now, look at here, folks.
This AP piece, AP piece also says this: quote, a Justice Department official who would only discuss the issue on condition of anonymity said that the NRA ad misrepresents Obama's gun proposals and that the regime has never backed a gun registry or gun confiscation.
Hey, Obama never backed same-sex marriage either until he did.
That's just silly.
Hey, hey, no, no.
Throughout this AP story, I mean, you have to love it.
The AP constantly speaks for the White House in this article.
Policies the White House does not support.
Policies the White House does support.
As though, I mean, it's just really sickening.
Hostess, bankrupt.
Hostess, Union Workers, Fat City.
Thanks to Obama.
Tell you how that happened and more of your phone calls when we get back.
All right, back to the phones to Terry in Colorado Springs.
You are on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hey, sir.
Thanks for taking my call.
You bet.
It's great to talk to you.
I wanted to address, I'm a 27-year Air Force veteran, just retired, and I wanted to address, you had a gentleman who called earlier that he had lost his contracting job with the DOD, Department of Defense, because of sequestration.
No, no.
Let me just be precise here.
He was told that he was losing his job for budget constraints related to the upcoming sequestration.
But I found an AP story all the way back in 2010 where the DOD announced a bunch of contractor cuts totaling $500 billion or whatever it was.
I forget the number already, but this is a program been underway for two years.
And this guy was just, they just told him the sequester had something to do with it to make it easy on them.
Absolutely.
And that was my point.
I've done budgets forever.
And if even under sequestration, even under budget cuts, if there were mission requirements or value added to that contract, I could keep him around.
I could reduce hours.
There were too many things I could do.
But what a lot of folks don't know is back during the first Bush One, they started cutting military positions and converting them to contractors.
And about five years ago, all those positions they converted to contractor, they started to convert to civilian positions.
Back in Bush One, why did they make the conversion to contractor?
They said they were saving money.
Yeah.
The way they went about doing it is they basically looked at an old old law that said that the government cannot be in competition with its civilians, and therefore they needed to contract out as much of the military as possible.
That's a crock.
You know this, you know, what bothers me about this?
I mean, I understand they need to cut spending, but they cut spending in all these inconsequential ways.
They're not saving any serious money by engaging in a two-year plan to let go the contractors.
What we need to do is make serious reductions in these entitlements.
Until that happens, all the rest of this is academic.
And these cuts on these people are done to make it look like the government's doing something.
But it doesn't add up to anything significant in terms of reducing deficits or debt.
There is no intention to reduce the deficit.
My last deployment to Iraq, I spent time working with the government of Iraq, trying to help them, among other things, figure out how to reduce the number of government employees they had.
This whole thing is to build the federal government and to reduce the number of jobs that are available on the civilian side.
And the problem is, is that, for example, in Iraq, I worked with the Ministry of Communications.
22,000 people were on the bankroll just for that one ministry.
Maybe 300 were needed to do the job.
Once you go down this slope, it's really tough to stop it.
Wait just a second.
If I heard you're right, I think you just said something that contradicts.
You said the government wants to eliminate civilian jobs.
They want to eliminate, and this is a problem because in the military we call civilian, government employees, civilians.
The government wants to reduce private sector jobs.
Right.
So why?
They want to increase the number of people in the government.
Okay, so why take people who are in the government and convert them to contractors?
Because the people they originally converted were not government, they were military positions.
They cut military positions first.
But still, if your idea is to maintain government as opposed to civilian employment, why take existing government employees and make them civilian and then eventually fire them?
Well, I guess the point I'm trying to make is back when they started this outsourcing, I mean, you don't look at a military person like you do a civilian in government position.
How you keep them, the rules that apply to them are much different.
But they did that under the auspices of saving money.
Now they've turned around and now they're trying to take all those contract positions.
They should be turning them back into military positions if they really need them, but instead they're turning them into civilian positions, government civilian positions.
Right.
And there's no real deficit reduction that's any kind of an objective here, right?
No, there's none.
It's going to be more expensive in the long run for the civilians because once a civilian, a government civilian is on the payroll after the year, it's almost impossible to get rid of them.
So essentially, if I'm hearing you're right, what's happening is it a three-step process?
What happens is you convert uniform jobs to contractor jobs, and then you convert those to civilian jobs.
Correct.
And it happened in a lot of our support fields, like our security police, like our people who do communications, telephones, our civil engineers.
You have some bases that were completely outsourced, the whole organization, and now they're slowly converting those back to civilians.
Okay, and the objective...
They were not saving money and couldn't afford it, so their answer is, well, let's see if we can get civilians.
And that's not going to be any cheaper.
No, but at the same time, you're downsizing the military, which is an objective of this bunch.
Oh, yes.
Well, I don't know.
All this is so convoluted.
Especially, Terry, thanks for the call.
All of this is done.
They say it's deficit reduction.
They say it's cost savings.
They say it's this doesn't even scratch the surface of actually saving costs.
You look at all the federal social programs that are redundant.
I mean, how many school lunch programs are there?
School breakfast programs?
How many children's health programs are there?
They're built on top of each other.
That's where we're going to have to start making cuts if we're going to have deficit reduction, if we're going to reduce debt.
But all of these, you know, the little casual list, like the guy that called earlier, he's a consultant, defense consultant, a contractor, those kind of cuts.
Those are just for optics.
Make it look like the government's being cut.
Make it look like we're taking deficit reduction seriously when none of the sort is taking place.
Now, I alluded to something here in the first hour of the program, and I want to go back to this because the Wall Street Journal has an interesting story today.
Already, I saw CNN this morning, and they were talking to Dana Bash as the infobabe up there from the White House or Capitol.
I forget where she is now.
It doesn't matter.
They asked her, what's different this time, Dana?
I mean, in the fiscal cliff and these other crises, there's always a last-minute settlement and crisis is averted.
And she was asked, why is that not thought to be the case?
Why is everybody so convinced that sequester is going to happen?
And she said, because there are no talks, no negotiations.
Congress isn't talking to the White House.
Obama's not talking to Boehner.
McConnell's not talking to Boehner and McConnell's not talking to Obama.
And the guy that did the video is not talking to the court.
I mean, nobody's talking.
There aren't any negotiations.
Here's another reason.
That's what I'm leading to.
It's the Wall Street Journal.
Already looking past the current budget impasse gripping the Capitol, i.e. sequestration, congressional leaders are quietly considering a deal to avert a government shutdown next month.
Attention is beginning to shift away from this Friday, which is the sequester date, when the broadcuts known as the sequester kick in, to the next budget deadline, which is Congress must pass a continuing resolution by the end of March to keep funding government operations.
So the point here is, ladies and gentlemen, they've had everybody worked up now into a fever pitch over the sequester and all the horrors that will visit us.
And it turns out that is nothing compared to what comes up the end of March.
The sequester is simply the result of a deal not having been made to fund specific certain government operations.
And the deal is if they don't get the deal, then of course the absolute worst thing to happen, Medicare and defense budget cuts.
Well, can't have that.
But the end of March, the entire government might shut down, folks, again.
Because see, we don't have, and we have not had for four years an annual budget.
We have been funding the government with what are called continuing resolutions.
And they occur every year to 18 months.
And this is, by the way, a purposeful policy by the Democrats to keep everybody in a fevered pitch crisis mode.
It is a way to hide their spending plans, which a budget would reveal.
And it is a way to actually end up spending more money because during the period of time of the continuing resolution, you can throw anything in there you want, keep spending and spending and spending.
Then you're eventually going to run out of the authority to spend and you need to renew it.
Hence, you need a new continuing resolution.
So my point is that however bad they have painted this sequester, however it is they've exaggerated it, at the end of March, we're looking at another possible entire government shutdown, not just a firefighter here and a cop there and somebody over there.
We're looking at everybody.
We cannot escape this.
And so what the Wall Street Journal is saying is that the reason there aren't any talks going on right now about the sequester is that it's really chump change compared to the CR, the continuing resolution that'll perspire at the end of March.
As far as we are concerned, all it means is that we're the gerbils or hamsters that are continuing to run in circles here.
And we're not making any ground.
We're not gaining ground.
We're just treading water, essentially.
We're basically keeping our heads afloat.
And we are in a cispool of crisis.
And it's being done on purpose, this constant crisis mentality.
And from month to month now, it seems.
Every month, there is a new budget crisis or challenge.
But the next one, that would mean not just the sleigh ride concession in Jellystone Park shutdown.
And not just, you know.
By the way, I found the truth about those 800,000 civilian Pentagon employees.
You know what that really is?
Remember, Panetta said that he was preparing to lay off 800,000.
You know what it really adds up to?
They will not work one day a week.
They currently work a five-day week.
If the sequester happens, they will work a four-day week.
They're being furloughed one day of the work week.
That's the panic.
They will miss one day's worth of pay from a total work week.
They're not being laid off in toto.
They're not being sent home.
They are simply, it's like a school furlough when they run out of money in the school district.
Shut school down every Friday for a semester if they run out of money.
That's what the civilian, the 800,000.
This is my instinct.
We're not going to lay off 800,000 Pentagon employees, civilian Pentagon employees, over $45 billion.
We're just not going to do it.
Well, I was right.
They work a five-day week, and what's going to happen is they'll work a four-day week if sequester happens.
Anyway, many of them probably celebrate.
My friends, sadly, that's it.
A rousing start to another busy broadcast week.
Hosted by me, Rushland Boy, your guiding light through times of trouble, confusion, murkiness, tumult, chaos, and yes, even the good times.