It’s an odds on favorite bet that if Congress decides to “fix” the US’s looming pension problem, it will make that problem worse. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:
There seems to be an unwritten rule with lawmakers that, every time they create a terrible piece of legislation, they give it the most noble-sounding name.
The USA PATRIOT Act from 2001 was a great example. It sounds great. Who wouldn’t love a law named for Patriots?
And yet that was easily among the most freedom-killing laws ever passed in US history, giving the federal government nearly unlimited authority to wage war and spy on its own people.
There are so many other examples– the USA FREEDOM Act from 2015 (which renewed many of the worst provisions of the PATRIOT Act).
Or the HIRE Act from 2010, which created some of the most heinous tax rules of the last fifty years.
The names of these laws all sounded wonderful. But their effects were absolutely terrible.
The new SECURE Act will likely be no different.
If you haven’t heard of SECURE, it’s a new piece of legislation aimed at ‘fixing’ the US retirement system.
SECURE stands for “Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement”, which is pretty clever when you think about it.
People want to associate their retirement with a word like ‘secure’. So even without knowing anything about the law, most people will probably have good feelings about it based solely on the name.
But if you actually read the legislation, SECURE contains a number of predictably terrible consequences.
For starters, SECURE is a basically a gigantic tax increase. And it’s a tax increase that will particularly affect your children when you pass away.
