“Once a year someone always posts on this topic as though it is news. This same stuff has been talked about for at least the past ten years.”
Yeah, and every year I respond with this:
The problem with such a seizure, is that unless it was all secretly pre-planned in massive detail such that on one late Friday afternoon the dictator President announced freezing all IRAs, 401(b)s, 403(b)s and all other plans, the normal process of legislative authorization and its lengthy debate would give plenty of time for everyone to sell out of their retirement accounts, biting the bullet of paying the maximum tax rate incurred from emptying the accounts in a single year. Such a scenario in which everyone attempted to exit at the same time would crash the financial systems and the economy and do it in such a way recovery would be nearly impossible.
Even the above mentioned freeze would itself crash the economy. After all, the government itself couldn’t exactly sell off those trillions overnight in order to convert them to money or government bonds without crashing the economy either. Heck, they couldn’t even do that over the course of several years. Not to mention the chaos in the markets due to the massive uncertainty such a seizure would cause, meaning the seized assets would become suddenly worthless anyway. And finally, such a seizure would leave millions destitute and lead to massive numbers of lawsuits, adding more chaos and uncertainty.
So the paranoid scenario of sudden retirement account seizure by the government has a probability that approaches zero.
It will be via Executive Order, not legislation, and they will probably implement it during a severe crisis. That's my guess. It could be a natural disaster, it could be a financial collapse, it could be war. It could be all of those things simultaneously.
Here's something you might want to know...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cNSwc_NCok