American Ideals

Obama is pressing hard to prevent Americans from returning to putting money away for their own retirement, saying that the nation will “suffer a massive blow” if its citizens are forced to return to pre-recession levels of contributing to their own retirement savings account. The account is called Social Security, of course, and it was Obama's idea to reduce the level of savings in the first place, putting money borrowed by the government into that national retirement savings account instead.

Now he wants not only to continue the reduced level of contribution to savings for retirement, he wants to reduce it even more, and to “pay for it” by increasing taxes on rich people by an equal amount. He is angry at anyone in government who opposes this idea.

He wants us regular folks count on someone else to put money into the retirement savings account for our benefit, let rich people do it, so that we can spend our money on flat screen televisions and new cars instead of having to put it aside for our own retirement.

If we had any self respect, we would reject that idea. America, we claim, is founded on the ideal of self responsibility and self reliance. But in reality we merely pay lip service to those ideals, and the idea of having rich people pay for our retirement so that we can spend more money now is hugely popular. “Tax the rich.”