Representative George Miller.       Remember that name !

George Miller , House Education and Labor Committee Chairman, was quoted as saying “a wholesale re-examination” of the current pension system is in order given the catasphrophic drop in the value of 401k plans over the past month.  “Fiddling around the margins is not going to serve the American people,” Miller said Wednesday, questioning the wisdom of having letting 401(k) funds — subject to the ebbs and flows of the stock market — supplant the traditional defined-benefit pension plans which used to be the American norm. “Being able to save for retirement after a lifetime of hard work has always been a core tenet of the American dream.  We can’t allow the promise of a secure retirement for workers to become a casualty of this financial crisis.”  Workforce Protections Subcommittee chairwoman Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, agreed. “We need to make big changes in this country. “… This is a rude awakening.”

A rude awakening Indeed!  For the past 10 years, both the House of Representatives and the United States Senate (the finest politicians lobbyists can afford) have blocked every measure that attempted to reign in the rampant corruption and greed that gave us sub-prime mortgages, CDOs, CMOs and several other exotic financial instruments that even Alan Greenspan didn’t understand.  To Representatives Miller and Woolsey, I respectfully assert you are as much to blame as Wall Street, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the hucksters peddling unaffordable loans to gullible rubes, and last but not least the rubes who knew they couldn’t afford the mortgage in the first place. 

There’s lots of blame to go around, so please help yourselves to a whopping portion.  Rep. Miller, you’ve been in Congress since 1974 and Rep. Woolsey, you’ve been there for 12 years now.  Plenty of time to workup an huge appetite for warmed over “Wall Street Meltdown” stew.  Me, my kids, grand-kids and great grand-kids will be paying this off for the next 50 years!   So eat up!

But I digress. 

Now this collection of the “best and the brightest”, wants to revamp the retirement system.  This is the same bunch who hadn’t a clue that the mortgage industry, aided and abetted by Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd, was constructing a massive Ponzi scheme based on the highly questionable assumption that folks making barely more than minimum wage could afford to buy even the median $150,000 house!

So please, do us all a favor and don’t help.  Really.  Find some other “problem” to which you can focus your efforts.  You know, really important, earth-shattering, life-in-the-balance stuff like: snail darters, gypsy moths, global warming, dying sea turtles , baby seal clubbing, wrinkle free shirts that come out of the dryer with wrinkles or support hose that doesn’t.   Just stay away from anything of real importance.  Please, let the adults handle it. 

The statement “We can’t allow the promise of a secure retirement for workers to become a casualty of this financial crisis” speaks volumes.  Phrases like Nanny State, Big Government and helicopter parenting come to mind. 

If by we you mean Congress ….

Stay the hell out of my life, George. Don’t need your help; didn’t ask for it! Let me and my employer figure out how to fund my retirement.  I’m a big boy and don’t need or want your hand-holding in the dark financial night.

Lynn, find someone else to mommy.  We don’t need big changes in this country.  We need a return to what we were.  Self-reliant, fiercely independent people who looked upon governmental assistance as “charity”; something of which they were ashamed.  My parent’s generation had pride and dignity. They weren’t called “The Greatest Generation” for nothing.

Thanks to them and their example, I’ve gotten to where I am in life (in spite of the best efforts of government,) so please, don’t start “helping” me now. I can’t afford any more help!

All governmental “assistance” comes at a price.

Usually cold hard cash sucked out of your paycheck before you even see it but increasingly the price is loss of personal liberty.

To paraphrase former SecDef Rumsfeld “You have to run the country with the government you have; not the government you want.”

On Nov 4, 2008, we get to pick the government we will have.  
Choose wisely and it will be the one we want.