by Ronni Bennett
Recently, Cowtown Pattie of
Texas Trifles blog sent me an
eight-page brief [pdf] from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College titled
What is the Age of Reason? In Pattie's words, it is a “chilling read” and she is not wrong.
The four authors of this brief are identified as a senior financial economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, a senior economist with the Federal Reserve System, a professor of finance at New York University and another professor at Harvard.
Among them, they acknowledge funding from the
National Science Foundation (NSF) which is a federal agency and the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a division of the National Institutes of Health that describes itself as “leading the federal effort on aging research.” Bear with me – it's important that you know the genesis of this document.
The authors note that the views expressed in the brief
“do not represent the policies or positions of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, or the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.”
Whether the views of the NSF or NIA are represented is not stated.
Four of those eight pages of the brief are a title page, references and endnotes, so there's not much text.
The majority of the brief, including four graphs, gives a short overview of studies the authors analyzed which, they say, show “The prevalence of both dementia and cognitive impairment without dementia rises rapidly with age” and that older adults make more financial mistakes than mid-age adults.
All right - so far, so good in that this is true for SOME old people, although the information is nothing new. This is what academics do – slice and dice each other's work, sometimes to good effect and sometimes not, and issue thousands of briefs every year most of which sink into oblivion. But then the authors get to their conclusions ominously titled, “Possible Policy Responses”:
“In response to this problem, several policy approaches are possible and government intervention is probably desirable, although the ideal form of intervention remains unclear.” [emphasis added]
The authors immediately dismiss their first and only benign policy suggestion for government intervention - to strengthen financial disclosure requirements to the public – by stating that “we are skeptical that improved disclosure will be effective in improving financial choices.”
Then the brief begins to get scary – remember, this all targets elders. The second suggestion involves “financial driving licenses,” the requirement to pass a test before being allowed to make non-trivial financial decisions. They ask a whole bunch of feasibility questions including the all-important, Who would be required to take the test?
Well, not me; I will resist clear to the barricades. Reading this brief, I'm beginning to have some sympathy for the teabaggers who object to too much government.
In their final suggestion, the authors step all the way across the line into totalitarianism with “mandatory advance directives” in which adults would be
required by a certain age to sign a document placing management of their assets with a third party if they become incapacitated.
That's already too much to stomach, but it gets worse.
“...a fiduciary could be appointed to approve all 'significant financial transactions' involving the principal’s funds after the principal reaches a designated age.” [emphasis added]
In regard to that diabological idea, the authors admit that “it might be perceived by some older adults as an unfair restriction targeted against them.”
DUH!
Not content to pull Social Security out from under elders (as too many in Congress are currently attempting to do), now they are thinking up ways to take everything else old people have.
As I noted above, thousands of such studies are written each year and most sink out of sight before the ink is dry. Some of them sometimes work their way through the bureaucracy to become policy or law. I have no confidence that this one, that would give the government or its appointees access to trillions of dollars in elder assets, will disappear.
Remember that two of these researchers work for federal agencies involved with monetary policy of commercial and investment banking, two others with major universities that are paid to supply the federal government with policy research, and the funding for this project comes from two other federal agencies.
Read the brief for yourself
here [pdf].
TIME GOES BY | Big Brother is Out to Control All Elders' Money
Image by runran via Flickr
