ECM sent me this terrifying story.
Excerpt:
People’s retirement savings are a convenient source of revenue for governments that don’t want to reduce spending or make privatizations. As most pension schemes in Europe are organised by the state, European ministers of finance have a facilitated access to the savings accumulated there, and it is only logical that they try to get a hold of this money for their own ends. In recent weeks I have noted five such attempts: Three situations concern private personal savings; two others refer to national funds.
The most striking example is Hungary, where last month the government made the citizens an offer they could not refuse. They could either remit their individual retirement savings to the state, or lose the right to the basic state pension (but still have an obligation to pay contributions for it). In this extortionate way, the government wants to gain control over $14bn of individual retirement savings.
The Bulgarian government has come up with a similar idea. $300m of private early retirement savings was supposed to be transferred to the state pension scheme. The government gave way after trade unions protested and finally only about 20% of the original plans were implemented.
The article describes 3 other countries that are grabbing more individual retirement contributions.
This is exactly where the Democrats would take us.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Erm, I take your point (and we have to wait and see what happens), but I must say that by no measure can the current governments of either Hungary or Bulgaria be described as “socialist” or for that matter “left-wing”. In both countries the socialists (which in Hungary had become rather Tony Blair Social-Democratic-like, with much incompetence and corruption; in Bulgaria a little less so) were utterly crushed at the most recent elections;
“Populist right-wing” would probably be a better description (perhaps with some caveats) for both governments. The Bulgarian one is more thuggish, and the Hungarian one potentially authoritarian. While for various reasons I don’t agree with another (generally well-informed) commentator, who in today’s Times (of London) compared the Hungarian PM Viktor Orban to Margaret Thatcher (although I think 20 years ago, when he was a young reformer it might have been a fair and accurate comparison), the point is that the ideological role models for these governments are decidedly not socialist in any way! – Check the alliances the ruling parties of both countries are in at the level of the European Parliament, for example.
(On reading the headline
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