As the presidential campaign winds down, an important question toward predicting the outcome is how undecided voters break. For years now, the conventional wisdom has held that these voters are unhappy with the incumbent (or his party) and most will vote for the challenger when they enter the polling booth. In the Democratic primaries however, it seems that undecided voters broke heavily away from Barack Obama and toward Hillary Clinton; they viewed the election as a referendum on him. And when he never 'closed the deal,' most voted against him.
So as this election comes to a close, will Obama be able to assuage the concerns of those who still aren't backing him? It probably depends to a large degree on whether the cycle closes with a series of stories that reassure them that Barack Obama and the Democrats can be trusted with both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
For those who wonder whether it's a good idea to elect a Democratic president who's likely to green-light the liberal agenda of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, it might be alarming to hear that they are considering killing 401k accounts:
House Democrats recently invited Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor at the New School of Social Research, to testify before a subcommittee on her idea to eliminate the preferential tax treatment of the popular retirement plans. In place of 401(k) plans, she would have workers transfer their dough into government-created "guaranteed retirement accounts" for every worker. The government would deposit $600 (inflation indexed) every year into the GRAs. Each worker would also have to save 5 percent of pay into the accounts, to which the government would pay a measly 3 percent return. Rep. Jim McDermott, a Democrat from Washington and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee's Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, said that since "the savings rate isn't going up for the investment of $80 billion [in 401(k) tax breaks], we have to start to think about whether or not we want to continue to invest that $80 billion for a policy that's not generating what we now say it should."
Given the long-term Social Security insolvency problem, private retirement accounts have become far more important to working Americans. Why would senior Democrats want to confiscate these retirement contributions and replace them with a program that is almost the same is the insolvent Social Security program?
