By Dave Gonigam
Wonder if he’s had any phone conversations about the idea with Tony James…
Zweig was careful to point out no decisions had been made. But he seems to know which way the political winds are blowing. He quoted a Washington lawyer named Bradford Campbell, who was assistant secretary of labor under Bush the Younger.
When it comes to Trump’s tax reform, “it’s not really a question of whether retirement plans will get a haircut, but of how much,” said Campbell. Tax reform is always “a game of winners and losers, and the retirement system is poised to be one of the losers.”
And by wiping out the tax-deferral benefit of a 401(k) — effectively switching future contributions to a Roth-style plan without your consent — Uncle Sam would collect a $1.5 trillion windfall over the next decade.
But wait — even worse ideas are afoot.
Last year, an outfit called the Tax Policy Center issued its own paper. This group is backed by the center-left Brookings Institution, and one of the paper’s authors hails from the conservative American Enterprise Institute. So beware — it’s got bipartisan support.
Under this proposal, existing 401(k)s would still be available. But — and this is a huge but — the annual gains in your account would be taxed at a 15% rate. That would raise $48 billion in new revenue starting next year — enough, the report’s authors said, to offset at least some of the revenue lost by cutting the corporate income tax to 15%.
Think about this for a minute: Under this proposal, your retirement money might be better off in a taxable account. At least there you don’t pay capital gains tax until you sell!
The authors justify the tax by saying the corporate income tax cut will juice corporate earnings and thus share prices, so a bigger retirement account will offset any piddling tax you’d have to pay.
Yeah, pull the other one…
Bottom line: If Washington really is about to undertake the biggest tax reform since 1986, everything is on the table — including your 401(k).
Retirement pros were sensing this only weeks after Trump’s election. “It is incomprehensible to me that Congress will not go after retirement plans in some way in tax reform,” said Randy Hardock, a partner at the high-powered D.C. law firm Davis & Harman, and a former staffer on the Senate Finance Committee.
Who knows how it might all end? These are just broad-stroke ideas. The details could be even more horrifying: Maybe your existing 401(k) funds would be converted to a Roth and your entire account would become taxable income in a single year. (Now there’d be an instant windfall for Uncle Sam, even if it would be a financial-planning nightmare for you.)
It’s still early days. But we’ll be keeping a wary eye… and anticipating defensive strategies you might want to adopt, depending on what Goldman Gary and his friends are cooking up.
Regards,