Regulation tends to cost lower income people more
I know that’ll come as an absolute stunner, huh? Not really. Regulation costs money. It costs money for compliance enforcement, which comes from taxes, and it costs companies money for compliance in the form of higher costs – costs that are passed on to consumers.
So? So – from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, find out:
Low-income households benefit the most when they act to reduce their exposure to the greatest risks they face, such as relatively common events and activities that cause illness, injury, and death, many of which can be traced to living in unsafe neighborhoods. In contrast, high-income households generally focus more on small risks—for example, tiny environmental risks that are far less likely to occur and generally affect fewer people at the expo- sure levels regulations address.
LOWER INCOME HOUSEHOLDS BEAR MORE OF THE COSTS OF REGULATION
Regulation focused on small risks delivers benefits to a limited group but spreads the costs across everyone. As a result, regulation effectively transfers money from low income households, who need to prevent larger risks, to high income households, who are concerned about small risks. Low income households are, in a sense, paying for the lifestyle preferences of the wealthy.
Such regulation increases consumer prices and lowers worker wages.
• Regulations act like a regressive sales tax, with middle and lower income households bearing much of the cost of rules that focus on the risk preferences of wealthier households, since they all pay the same, higher prices.
• Cost of regulation as a share of income is estimated to be as much as six to eight times higher for low-income households than for high-income households.
• [Diana] Thomas estimates that households can mitigate the same level of mortality risks privately for about one fifth of the cost of public risk-reduction strategies.
Well, imagine that, the laws of economics at work in a very predictable way. And, of course, completely opposite of the professed claim of the left to be on the side of the poor. Because it is that very group that continually push more and more regulation because, one assumes, they believe if some regulation is good, more has to be better. But, as a group, being mostly economically illiterate combined with unaccountable faith in government power, they end up with these sorts of ‘unintended consequences’ all of the time.
~McQ
On casting stones at same-sex couples
Over at RedState, Erick Erickson promoted a post in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage by “mjdaniels,” a Christian conservative and long-time lurker there. It’s a long post that makes a number of good points, but he ultimately makes a number of rhetorical errors that give his fellow Christian conservatives an easy way out, and they did fix on those errors. So it is that the people I see praising his argumentation with the fewest reservations are mostly not currently practicing Christians or self-identified conservatives.
Among those errors, the biggest was probably when he said, “Is Homosexuality a Sin? I. Do. Not. Care.” Christians are supposed to care whether others sin. The proper question is the duty others have to sinners. And behold all the RedState regular commenters saying that they’re called to rebuke sin and lead sinners away from sin, out of love. Many deny that enshrining these rebukes in legal exclusivity is tantamount to “hunting down sinful people,” and they claim that it isn’t them but same-sex marriage activists who are trying to “wield the power of the government to enforce my convictions on others.”
I’d sorely like to see how his fellow Christian conservatives would respond if they couldn’t focus on those errors. In particular, I wished “mjdaniels” had better focused on something he only said in passing at the end of his post: that opponents of same-sex marriage were essentially calling for “casting the first stone at” this set of sinners.
It seems to me that when persuading Christian conservatives, one should be absolutely clear that the status quo is coercion – discriminatory taxes and inheritance rules, and denying the right to contract, all of which conservatives agree is state coercion when it’s applied to them – and that when Jesus was challenged to support such coercion (stoning a woman caught in the act of adultery, according to Mosaic Law), he in turn challenged the teachers of law and Pharisees that the first stone should be cast by one who is without sin. When no one would stone her, he said he would not condemn her that way either, and he simply told her to leave her life of sin.
If even Jesus doesn’t think it’s humans’ place to punish violations of one of the Ten Commandments dealing with marriage, then it’s an uphill climb for a Christian conservative to argue that it’s their duty to uphold the use of such force based on moral strictures that are much less clear.
I find it baffling that conservatives think the government is capable of making a compact sacred by calling it a marriage, but there I see it in the RedState comments. Do they teach their children that the state’s refraining from coercion is an indication of societal approval of a behavior? No; what is not prohibited is merely left to be governed by the other aspects of civil society (the family, the market, churches, social pressure, etc.) and, if Christians are correct, God’s ultimate judgment.
Were American’s misled about the cost of ObamaCare?
Does a duck quack? Of course they were. Were politicians pushing an agenda involved? That’s a rhetorical question:
And yes, we told you so.
As Thomas Sowell pointed out, and I’m paraphrasing, how anyone thought that adding a layer of bureaucracy and regulation to the current system was going to drive costs down was beyond him.
And it was beyond most people who have even a modicum of common sense.
Medical claims costs — the biggest driver of health insurance premiums — will jump an average 32 percent for Americans’ individual policies under President Obama’s overhaul, according to a study by the nation’s leading group of financial risk analysts.
The report could turn into a big headache for the Obama administration at a time when many parts of the country remain skeptical about the Affordable Care Act. The estimates were recently released by the Society of Actuaries to its members.
While some states will see medical claims costs per person decline, the report concluded the overwhelming majority will see double-digit increases in their individual health insurance markets, where people purchase coverage directly from insurers.
The disparities are striking. By 2017, the estimated increase would be 62 percent for California, about 80 percent for Ohio, more than 20 percent for Florida and 67 percent for Maryland. Much of the reason for the higher claims costs is that sicker people are expected to join the pool, the report said.
Well done, Democrats — well done.
~McQ
Study: Government policy primarily the reason for sub-prime mortgage meltdown
Despite the attempt by government and particularly Democrats, to blame the financial meltdown we’ve endured on banks and unscrupulous investment companies, the buck stops with them according to a new study just released:
Democrats and the media insist the Community Reinvestment Act, the anti-redlining law beefed up by President Clinton, had nothing to do with the subprime mortgage crisis and recession.
But a new study by the respected National Bureau of Economic Research finds, “Yes, it did. We find that adherence to that act led to riskier lending by banks.”
Added NBER: “There is a clear pattern of increased defaults for loans made by these banks in quarters around the (CRA) exam. Moreover, the effects are larger for loans made within CRA tracts,” or predominantly low-income and minority areas.
As we’ve mentioned previously any number of times, government policies can set and enforce preverse incentives. And that has nothing to do with a free market. That’s at best a mixed market. So no, the problem wasn’t a “market failure”, it was the usual result of government intruding and setting preverse incentives that are contrary to good business practices and would likely not survive or succeed in an actual free market.
Here’d the bottom line:
The strongest link between CRA lending and defaults took place in the runup to the crisis — 2004 to 2006 — when banks rapidly sold CRA mortgages for securitization by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Wall Street.
CRA regulations are at the core of Fannie’s and Freddie’s so-called affordable housing mission. In the early 1990s, a Democrat Congress gave HUD the authority to set and enforce (through fines) CRA-grade loan quotas at Fannie and Freddie.
It passed a law requiring the government-backed agencies to “assist insured depository institutions to meet their obligations under the (CRA).” The goal was to help banks meet lending quotas by buying their CRA loans.
But they had to loosen underwriting standards to do it. And that’s what they did.
Not only that, they guaranteed the bad loans with your money. Why do you think so much money has had to be pumped into those two institutions?
You see the market had determined that certain standards protected their investments. The government decided to ignore reality and push a social agenda using “race” as the basis for throwing out those standards and using their coercive power to implement the social agenda they preferred.
The result was predictable.
And the coverup as well.
~McQ
Apologizing for authoritarianism
That’s essentially what Sarah Conely does in a NY Times op-ed. Oh, she cloaks it benignly enough -”it’s just soda” – as he supports the Bloomberg ban on large volume soda sales. But in essence what she claims is “government knows best” and “giving up a little liberty isn’t so bad if it benefits the majority”.
You see, liberty, in her world, is much less important that security or safety. And we, as knuckle dragging neanderthals, don’t always know what is best for us or how to accomplish our goals without the hand of government to guide us (how we ever managed to make it to the 21st century without that guiding hand is still a mystery in Conely’s circle). Sure some can do it, but most can’t and so laws should be designed to protect and guide (coercively of course) those who can’t (or are believed to be unable).
A lot of times we have a good idea of where we want to go, but a really terrible idea of how to get there. It’s well established by now that we often don’t think very clearly when it comes to choosing the best means to attain our ends. We make errors. This has been the object of an enormous amount of study over the past few decades, and what has been discovered is that we are all prone to identifiable and predictable miscalculations.
Research by psychologists and behavioral economists, including the Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky, identified a number of areas in which we fairly dependably fail. They call such a tendency a “cognitive bias,” and there are many of them — a lot of ways in which our own minds trip us up.
For example, we suffer from an optimism bias, that is we tend to think that however likely a bad thing is to happen to most people in our situation, it’s less likely to happen to us — not for any particular reason, but because we’re irrationally optimistic. Because of our “present bias,” when we need to take a small, easy step to bring about some future good, we fail to do it, not because we’ve decided it’s a bad idea, but because we procrastinate.
We also suffer from a status quo bias, which makes us value what we’ve already got over the alternatives, just because we’ve already got it — which might, of course, make us react badly to new laws, even when they are really an improvement over what we’ve got. And there are more.
The crucial point is that in some situations it’s just difficult for us to take in the relevant information and choose accordingly. It’s not quite the simple ignorance [John Stuart] Mill was talking about, but it turns out that our minds are more complicated than Mill imagined. Like the guy about to step through the hole in the bridge, we need help.
So, now that we have these Nobel Prize winning psychologists and behavioral economists on the record saying we’re basically inept shouldn’t it be clear to you, as Conely concludes, that “we need help”?
That sort of “help” used to come from family, friends and community. We somehow managed, for around 200 years, to grow and succeed splendidly without government intruding and trying to control our lives.
The basic premise of her piece is much the same as Bloomberg’s more direct assault:
The freedom to buy a really large soda, all in one cup, is something we stand to lose here. For most people, given their desire for health, that results in a net gain. For some people, yes, it’s an absolute loss. It’s just not much of a loss.
Or to quote a more succinct Bloomy: “I do think there are certain times we should infringe on your freedom.”
Notice the arbitrariness of the “I do think”. His choice, not yours. Bloomberg picked sodas. What else could he or those like him arbitrarily pick next time? Think government health care for example and your mind explodes with where they could go.
And notice Conely’s dismissal of the loss of freedom as “not much” of a loss. Incrementalism at its finest. Pure rationalization of the use the coercive power of the state to do what they think is best for you, because, as her academic colleagues have stressed, “we need help.” And our betters are always there to “help” us, aren’t they?
Funny too how the solution is always the same, isn’t it?
And their desire to intrude? Well its wrapped up in their concept of government’s role in our lives:
In the old days we used to blame people for acting imprudently, and say that since their bad choices were their own fault, they deserved to suffer the consequences. Now we see that these errors aren’t a function of bad character, but of our shared cognitive inheritance. The proper reaction is not blame, but an impulse to help one another.
That’s what the government is supposed to do, help us get where we want to go.
No. It’s not. That isn’t at all the function of government as laid out in the Constitution. Not even close. It has always been our job to “get where we want to go”. Government’s job was to provide certain functions to ensure an equality of opportunity (like a fair legal system, stable monetary system, etc), but on the whole we were free to pursue our lives without its interference as long as we stayed within the legal framework and did no harm to others or attempted to defraud them.
Conely’s last sentence is the mask that fronts and justifies/rationalizes every authoritarian regime that has ever existed. If you don’t believe that, I invite you to look at the title of her last book. “Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism.”
Kind of says it all, doesn’t it?
~McQ
Is Michael Bloomberg the most dangerous man in America?
At least in terms of your freedoms?
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Sunday: Sometimes government does know best. And in those cases, Americans should just cede their rights.
“I do think there are certain times we should infringe on your freedom,” Mr. Bloomberg said, during an appearance on NBC.
Well, he may not be THE most dangerous, but he’s right up there with them. He’s just more blunt and obvious about it than most of the others.
I’m sorry folks, but this is an attitude that has pervaded our politics for quite some time and it is unacceptable. Totally unacceptable and should be stomped on like you would stomp a cockroach.
Government rarely “knows best” and has a dismal track record in that area. More importantly, this was a country founded on the principle of individual freedom (liberty) and heavy restraints on government power. As someone said, the Constitution doesn’t grant rights – they’re natural. What the Constitution is is a restraining order on government. Or was. It is government via people like Michael Bloomberg who’ve turned that upside down and feel comfortable enough to blurt what can only be considered authoritarian drivel (pick your brand) because he thinks he has the “right” to infringe on yours. His statement is anathema to all this country once believed in.
Yet, there are a good number of people today who will back his play and agree that he his job entails being big daddy and using the force of government to save you from yourself.
America?
Yeah, not really.
~McQ
GOP Senators prepare to cave on unnecessary gun control legislation
Let me preface this by saying there is absolutely no need for new gun control legislation. None. Nada. Zip. Zero.
The claims by the left that gun control legislation will solve problems of violence are nonsense. Period.
But that likely won’t stop the usual suspects among GOP Senators from helping the left in their incremental but determined efforts to limit your 2nd Amendment rights. Apparently “Congress shall make no law” has a different meaning to some people:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has emerged as a key player if Senate Democrats are to have any chance of passing legislation to expand background checks for private sales of firearms.
McCain and Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.) are at the top of a list of Republicans considered most likely to sign on to legislation expanding background checks after talks with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) stalled earlier this month.
Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) has signaled he will likely support the yet-to-be-finalized proposal he negotiated with Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to expand background checks to cover private gun sales, according to Senate sources.
Of course we’ve been assured by some that this is really of no big consequence and we should relax and let it happen.
Uh, no.
Like I said in the beginning – there is absolutely no need for new gun control legislation – none. The fact that some in the GOP seem poised to make that happen anyway should tell you all you need to know about certain members of that party and their professed claim to believe in your Constitutional rights all while negotiating parts of them away.
~McQ
Why it is so hard for government to quit spending
It’s hard, in a nutshell, because no one wants to see their favorite programs defunded. The system encourages politicians to pander to these constituencies for votes. The result is ever increasing spending while both the public and the politicians claim to be for spending cuts.
A perfect example of the process can be found in microcosm in Chicago, where, to save money in the wake of intemperate government spending, the school system plans on closing 54 schools. The constituency affected are not going to let this go quietly. Even though the plan would save the city $600 million over 10 years and certainly help close the 1 billion dollar shortfall it suffers, the people (voters and teacher’s unions) who don’t want those schools closed are taking their protest to the politicians (aldermen) who depend on their votes.
The problem now being realized with the process described above is there’s a thing called “reality” that intrudes on this system of ever increasing spending to satisfy the demands of ad hoc constituencies. It’s called economics. And it has laws that resist being broken. Laws such as you can only spend more than you have for so long before you can’t get anymore to spend. And at a local level, where a city government can’t print money, that reality has come to bear on the process that the city of Chicago has indulged in for so long.
It can’t afford the process any longer. And that means the process and its cycle will, of necessity, have to be broken if the city isn’t to become another Detroit. In the case of the school closings in Chicago, the only question that remains is whether or not the politicians, in the face of opposition by a coalition of voters/unions/politicians, will do what is necessary or – as we see on a national level time after time – endeavor to find a way to satisfy the coalition and kick the can down the road?
To the story:
Chicago Public Schools officials ended months of speculation when they released the list of 54 schools the city plans to close, but the pushback against Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his schools chief is likely just starting to ramp up.
As word of the schools on the long-awaited closings list trickled out Thursday, parents, teachers and community members — some furious, some in tears — vowed to fight the closings. One group took a bus of people to protest in front of the homes of school board members, and some parents spoke of a lawsuit. The Chicago Teachers Union already had scheduled a mass protest march through downtown for next week.
"We are the City of Big Shoulders and so we intend to put up a fight," union President Karen Lewis said. "We don’t know if we can win, but if you don’t fight, you will never win at all."
Emanuel and schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett say the closures are necessary because too many Chicago Public School buildings are half-empty, with 403,000 students in a system that has seats for more than 500,000. But opponents say the closures will further erode troubled neighborhoods and endanger students who may have to cross gang boundaries to attend school. The schools slated for closure are all elementary schools and are overwhelmingly black and in low-income neighborhoods.
About 30,000 students will be affected by the plan, with about half that number moving into new schools.
So 30k out of 403k will be effected in a school system that appears to have a declining population. Any sensible person would understand that even if money wasn’t a problem, at some point adjustments would need to be made.
But we’re a schizo population who somehow believes – even as our reality reminds us in our own lives daily that we’re delusional – that we can have our cake and eat it too.
This problem and the reality aren’t unique to Chicago:
Chicago is among several major cities, including Philadelphia, Washington and Detroit, to use mass school closures to reduce costs and offset declining enrollment. Detroit has closed more than 130 schools since 2005, including more than 40 in 2010 alone.
The problem is, however, pretty unique to cities who’ve followed that process I described above and, for the most part, have been “blue” strongholds for decades. Reality is weighing in on their misguided governance with a vengeance.
What’s interesting is it is pitting blue against blue (blue city government against teacher’s unions, etc.). And, it also has a coterie of politicians who refuse to accept reality because, well because it could cost them their jobs and the perks that come with it:
The issue has again pitted Emanuel against the Chicago Teachers Union, whose 26,000 members went on strike early in the school year, idling students for seven days. Chicago aldermen and other lawmakers also have blasted the plan.
Of course they have. Common sense and reality say the plan is the way to go.
But we all know, in the world of politics, common sense was killed off decades ago and reality is ignored as long as possible.
And look at the result.
~McQ
Feinstein’s assault weapons ban will not be in final Senate bill
Emily Miller, writing in the Washington Times, reports:
Gun control efforts on the nation level lost a major battle when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told a bereft Sen. Dianne Feinstein Monday that her so-called assault weapon ban bill was getting pulled from the gun package coming to the floor next month. Her legislation, which passed the SenateJudiciary Committee last week by a straight party line vote, is the only one of the four gun-related bills that passed out of committee that Mr. Reid axed.
Mrs. Feinstein insists she will not be ignored. The California Democrat plans to bring two amendments up during the gun votes — to ban firearms that have one cosmetic feature that makes them resembles military weapon and magazines that hold more than 10 rounds. Mr. Reid said Tuesday that “her amendment, using the most optimistic numbers, has less than 40 votes — that’s not 60.”
However, Mr. Reid’s calculation was really less about vote counting and more about keeping the majority in the upper chamber.
“The Democrats know that Feinstein’s ‘assault weapon’ ban is suicide at the polls for them come 2014,” Alan Gottlieb, the founder of the Second Amendment Foundation told me Tuesday. “It is so extreme that even the Democratic leadership in the Senate doesn’t want it as part of their package.”
So ‘whoohoo’, huh? Yeah, sort of, but Miller entitles her piece “RIP national assault weapons ban”. RIP? Hardly. If you think Democrats, or at least Feinstein, are going to quit on this, you’re wrong. Just consider how long they pushed for government mandated health care. The fact that they couldn’t muster 40 votes in the Senate is, to those who would take your guns, another temporary setback. Despite the fact that studies have shown no positive link a decline in gun violence and the last assault weapon’s ban, they’ll continue to try. Trust me on that. This isn’t about safety, it’s about controlt:
Mrs. Feinstein insists she will not be ignored. The California Democrat plans to bring two amendments up during the gun votes — to ban firearms that have one cosmetic feature that makes them resembles military weapon and magazines that hold more than 10 rounds.
Right now Democratic Senators are reading the electoral tea leaves and know that such a vote, at least for those in states where their seat isn’t safe, is electoral poison. As soon as they see or feel that the electorate’s opinion has shifted, they’ll gladly vote for such a ban. The lack of votes isn’t about principle, it’s about keeping their jobs.
“The Democrats know that Feinstein’s ‘assault weapon’ ban is suicide at the polls for them come 2014,” Alan Gottlieb, the founder of the Second Amendment Foundation told me Tuesday. “It is so extreme that even the Democratic leadership in the Senate doesn’t want it as part of their package.”
Mr. Obama does, of course. And so they’ll continue to try. And they’ll use the incremental approach instead.
And there’s something else to consider here – the politics of the Reid move. He’s taken the step of removing the most controversial parts of the gun control attempt. But there’s still more for the Senate to consider. And Reid is trying to use his removal of the “extreme” parts to demand a corresponding move (i.e. “compromise”) from the GOP in support of what’s left.
The background check bill is the most contentious of those three, and lawmakers are still working behind the scenes to find a compromise that can garner 60 votes in the chamber.
Sen. Joe Manchin III, a West Virginia Democrat who has been trying to work out a compromise, said Tuesday he was optimistic on that front.
“I’m still working very hard, and hopefully reasonable people will look at reasonable proposals and something will happen,” he said.
And what would that compromise bring?
Currently, all sales by licensed firearms dealers must go through background checks, but transactions between private individuals do not. Lawmakers are looking for a way to extend checks to almost all transactions without also creating a record-keeping system that gun rights supporters fear could turn into a gun registry.
How could it not turn into a defacto“gun registry”?
And who wants to bet that some GOP Senators end up supporting it?
~McQ
Are we looking at a Cyprus moment here?
I have to preface this by saying absolutely nothing would surprise me any more. Since this administration has come into office, what would have, or should have been, unthinkable previously has not only happened but has been cheered by a certain element of our population. ObamaCare is the most visible evidence of this. But there is plenty of other stuff too. Drone strikes on US citizens are “okay”, i.e. “legal”. Speaking of “legal” how about this:
The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters.
The proposed plan represents a major step by U.S. intelligence agencies to spot and track down terrorist networks and crime syndicates by bringing together financial databanks, criminal records and military intelligence. The plan, which legal experts say is permissible under U.S. law, is nonetheless likely to trigger intense criticism from privacy advocates.
More shredding of Constitutional guarantees. And what do we hear for the most part? A collective yawn.
We’ve all seen what has happened on Cyprus with the government imposing a “levy” on savers. A “levy”. Outright theft is what it is. And even while they’ve lowered the amount of the “levy” they’re still imposing it.
Couldn’t happen here, could it? Don’t bet on it. What other government is desperate for revenue? And where is it that 19 trillion dollars exist that is currently out of their reach?
Try 401(k)’s. Katie Pavlich has the story:
As a reminder, the United States government has been eying and researching how Americans use their 401k plans for quite some time now. Recently we saw the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau suggest the government help “manage” retirement plans.
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.
The bureau’s core concern is that many Americans, notably those from the retiring Baby Boom generation, may fall prey to financial scams, according to three people briefed on the CFPB’s deliberations who asked not to be named because the matter is still under discussion.
The retirement savings business in the U.S. is dominated by a group of companies that handle record-keeping and management of investments in tax-advantaged vehicles like 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts. The group includes Fidelity Investments, JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Charles Schwab Corp. (SCHW) and T. Rowe Price Group Inc. (TROW) Americans held $19.4 trillion in retirement assets as of Sept. 30, 2012, according to the Investment Company Institute, an industry association; about $3.5 trillion of that was in 401(k) plans.
So we have a new government agency (created in 2011) looking for a job to justify its continued existence and an administration and political elite looking for revenue while over 19 trillion dollars lays in front of them. The statement “the …. bureau is weighing whether it should take on the role of helping Americans manage [their] retirement savings” should send shivers down your spine. Why do they feel the need to consider such a thing?
Well, it’s because you need their protection:
This agency, created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank-Act, is very concerned about how safe your retirement savings are. They are apparently concerned that retiring baby boomers may become victims of financial scams.
That’s right, it’s save the geezers instead of the children. You’re simply too dumb to manage the account you’ve spent your entire working life amassing. You have to have government help to do it and that means what? Government access and, one would assume, at some point government permission to spend your dollars. How else does government save you from “scams” (you know, like Social Security)?
You sputter, “but they have no right…”. Since when has government really been concerned with rights? If it can give spy agencies access to your financial records “legally” to combat terrorism, how big of a stretch is it to believe they’ll grant another agency access to your financial records (401(k)) to combat “scams?”
And, with the camel of government’s nose under the tent, how long before that access turns into some sort of “levy” for this service they provide that you never asked for?
~McQ