People who have deposited funds in banks in Cyprus just narrowly escaped a bank robbery of epic proportions – not at the hands of masked robbers, but at the hands of the Cypriot government and the European Central Bank, which together were looking to perpetrate the worst kind of bailout.
Cyprus is a tiny nation with huge debt it can’t repay, and the ECB proposed a bailout that would have confiscated as much as 9.7 percent from wealthy depositors in Cypriot banks to help pay for it. Fortunately, this was too much for the Cypriot parliament, which voted down the proposal without a single vote in favor. A new proposal would see the bailout funded by a loan from Russia in exchange for the rights to oil leases in Cyprus.
The deposit confiscation idea was outrageous in every way, but you might think it’s nothing to worry about because Cyprus is a tiny nation in a different part of the world, and surely that sort of thing would never be contemplated here.
Don’t think that. As
CainTV told you in November, left-wing groups are already licking their lips at the money sitting in 401(k) individual retirement accounts. This is consistent with the complaint of Democrats like Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, who
insists that because we’re the richest nation on Earth, the solution to our deficit and debt is to simply go get that capital that’s lying around in private hands.
The Cyprus bailout proposal didn’t go forward because that nation’s leaders recognized its citizens wouldn’t stand for such a mass confiscation of private wealth. As of today, that would never fly in America either.
But if Democrats continue to sell people on the idea that the rich are their enemies, I can see the day when a majority of the public buys into a plan to simply confiscate funds from private bank accounts. They really think the money is rightfully theirs, and the only reason they haven’t taken it already is that they can’t find a politically plausible way to do so.
But don’t think for a second they won’t keep looking.
