If you want to know what those satanic Republicans are aiming for, read this...

The evil plot revealed...(emphasis mine, to help reveal the "hatefulness" of this stuff.)

An obscure paragraph added to the Revenue Act of 1978 by an unknown author has drastically changed the way Americans save for retirement and, possibly, how they vote.

Over the past 25 years, since a 38-year-old retirement consultant in Philadelphia got IRS approval to establish the first tax-deferred account system, 401(k)s have exploded, dramatically increasing the nation's investor class and boosting individuals' total savings.

Economic and political analysts say 401(k)s have enriched millions of American workers, particularly lower-income people, and their longer-term impact on the economy, especially investment capital formation, and the electorate is now coming into fuller view...

... Since 1990 total worker assets in 401(k) plans have grown by an average of 13 percent per year, from $385 billion to an estimated $2.1 trillion in 2004, the most recent year for which figures are available, according to the Investment Company Institute (ICI).

More than 43 million U.S. workers participated in 401(k)s at the end of 2004 -- up from 10 million in the mid-1990s -- representing nearly a third of the entire 144 million work force....

....Mr. Beach thinks the true savings rate in the U.S. is at least 15 percent when money being put into 401(k)s and other tax-advantage investment vehicles is added to traditional savings measures. There's more...

"Mutual stock funds are all counted as investments even though they are savings. You're talking about $4 trillion in actual savings when you lump all this together. I think the savings rate is really high," he said.

A recent ICI study of 401(k)s found that workers overall emerged from the bear market of the past several years with significantly increased retirement assets.

"By year-end 2004, the average account balance among 401(k) participants who had held accounts since at least 1999 increased by 36 percent, despite experiencing one of the worst bear markets for stocks since the Great Depression; rising 15 percent in 2004 alone," the study said....(Thanks to Orrin Judd)

This is what the President would like to do with Social Security, too. It's what Democrats call "destroying Social Security." And they are right. We want to destroy it and destroy poverty and dependence on government at the same time.

Democrats LOVE THE POOR. So much, good Christians that they are, that they want to keep them poor permanently. (Of course Democrat leaders make sure they themselves aren't poor; you can bet they have their own investments, even as they protect ordinary workers from such things.)

...Several bills dealing with tax breaks for investors were moving through Congress. One of them is the pension reform bill that passed the House on Dec. 15 by a 294-132 vote. One of its key provisions would encourage employers to automatically enroll new employees in 401(k) plans, making all workers employed by businesses with such plans regular investors unless they choose to opt out.

That provision, which has received relatively little attention in political circles, would effectively turn most of the nation's work force into investors with a growing personal stake in Wall Street and the corporate economy, economic analysts such as Mr. Beach said.

When economists at ICI calculated the effect of automatic enrollment, their model projected that the participation rate would rise to 92 percent of eligible employees. Notably, they found that the "positive impact of automatic enrollment on participation rates proved even stronger among lower-income workers."...

Such dirty tricks these Republicans are up to! (And that, my fellow conservatives, is why you should warmly support Republican candidates even when they are not entirely to your liking. Even John McCain. VOTE! Because stuff like this is happening under the radar all the time, and would stop dead if Democrats were in control.

...Meantime, the biggest question that looms over the growth of 401(k) accounts is whether they will provide future workers with enough income for a comfortable retirement over a longer life span, as 401(k) plans increasingly replace the old defined benefits plans that many businesses have been eliminating in an era of corporate cost-cutting.

Economists at ICI, which represents the investment industry, say their studies show that 401(k) plans are on track to provide between half to two-thirds of a worker's income in the decades to come.

"We developed a model in which we simulated a full career for a worker and took them to age 65 in 2030 and 2039 to calculate the income-replacement rate in retirement," Ms. Holden said. "We found that it would replace about half of their income among those in the bottom quartile and about two-thirds of their income" among higher earners...

That should be plenty for retirement, since older people are past a lot of life's big expenses, such as child-raising, and they will also have SS. And if Republicans can push through more of their cruel destroy-the-poor policies, they will be more likely to own a house, and to have a fat HSA to help cover medical expenses...