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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter van Steennis who wrote (142394)	12/7/2010 5:49:35 PM
From: Ed Ajootian	3 Recommendations Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 206184

Peter & CC, yes, I am absolutely certain that Roth IRA's will forever be tax-free. The reasons I am so certain of this are: 1) Tax policy I have studied and worked extensively with the US income tax system for more than 30 years. In the course of this work I have gotten an appreciation of the general themes underlying our tax policy. An important theme is that, due to the fact that we have a self-assessment system of taxation (i.e. we each file our own tax returns and tell the government what we think we owe), the government realizes that it is critical that there remain some sense of "fairness" to the tax rules. If this sense of "fairness" is ever taken away, then the government has no hope of getting folks to be honest about what they owe. So from a tax policy viewpoint it is inconceivable that they would ever tax Roth IRA's in the future. 2) Political expediency The Roth IRA overall, and particularly this one-time conversion option, have been greatly publicized and are now in the fabric of the American people. For a politician to vote for a bill that proposed to tax Roth IRA's would be political suicide. This would be akin to voting on a measure to eliminate the home mortgage deduction. Every few years, a study gets done on how best to revamp the tax code, and nearly every one of those includes a recommendation to either eliminate or sharply curtail the deduction for home mortgage interest. But when have you ever heard of that ever even getting proposed? There are a lot of uncertainties that need to be considered in connection with a Roth IRA conversion, but I firmly believe that your concern is not among them.