The Democrats have had their eyes on our 401k and IRA accounts for quite a while. The national debt is $16.5 trillion and growing by the minute. Their appetite for spending is insatiable, and there aren’t enough earners left to tax to pay for it all. But, look at all the money middle class Americans have saved for their retirements. Shortly after the 2012 election the left started referring to 401k’s as subsidies, and at the time I noted:

The main message here is that anyone who worked and saved for what they have didn’t earn it. Your earnings, in their minds, belong to someone else. You may not be rich by anyone’s standards, but if you worked and saved for your whole life, in their minds you’re fair game, because there’s someone out there who didn’t work and save. And now somehow that’s your problem. This is the Obama world. Maybe you worked and saved for your entire life as a middle class American. If the money you saved pushes you into the “rich” category by their standards you now must be punished.

That’s how they think, but they know they can’t come out and say that. So instead they’re going to “help you” manage your retirement.

The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is weighing whether it should take on a role in helping Americans manage the $19.4 trillion they have put into retirement savings, a move that would be the agency’s first foray into consumer investments.

“That’s one of the things we’ve been exploring and are interested in in terms of whether and what authority we have,” bureau director Richard Cordray said in an interview. He didn’t provide additional details.

They have such a great track record when they “foray” into other areas of our lives. Had they not “forayed” into the mortgage market our retirement accounts wouldn’t have taken such huge hits in 2008. If they haven’t forayed into bank bailouts the taxpayers wouldn’t be giving real subsidies to the Too Big To Fail banks to the tune of $83 billion per year. But we’re supposed to trust them with our retirement accounts? Look at Social Security and the public pensions, they’re all going broke. That’s why they want to foray into our 401k’s.

That article linked above is a Bloomberg article from about a month ago. Zero Hedge picked up on it earlier this month, and recently American Thinker had a lengthy article on the subject and today Maggie’s Notebook covered it. But I haven’t heard much about it in the rest of the media. Be sure to follow the links, they all have a lot more information.  And the idea of the government raiding our retirement accounts isn’t new, they’ve been talking about it since at least 2008 – see here, here and here. I’m sure they’re just waiting for the right crisis to come along so they can justify their actions.

Update: Here’s an angle I hadn’t thought of before. Do you think the Democrats float these ideas so people get nervous and withdraw funds from their 401k’s prematurely so the government will get a tax windfall?