State of the Union – protect your assets now

I am currently living outside of the US, 7 hours ahead of the east coast so I watched Obama’s State of the Union speech this morning on youtube.  I considered staying up until 4am last night just to watch it because his speeches, whether you agree with them or not, have significant impact on the entire world.

In last night’s speech, I feel like I was listening to my old high school football coach in the locker room pre-game.  It was a lot of rah-rah, but lots of fluff.  He left us with a broad agenda, much of which will never get implemented.  At least I hope most of it won’t.  I am hopeful that his optimism becomes reality, but I’m highly skeptical.

So far he has delivered nothing to improve the lives of Americans, but only burdened our children and grandchildren with huge amounts of debt to repay.  Granted this was initiated by the Bush administration, but he took the ball and ran with it.  In one year the money supply in the US has doubled, which will certainly cause massive amounts of inflation.  He has sent more troops to the middle east, bailed out huge, failed companies that continue to fund his parties campaign, and won a Nobel Prize.  Last week I was in Norway and even they think that is absurd.

One thing that really struck a chord with me in Obama’s speech was his pride in creating 2 million new jobs in 2009.  But where did these jobs come from?  As he stated, these were policemen, firemen, teachers and other public service workers.  He even suggested forgiving education debt for student who enter the public sector.  Interesting.  Maybe he should go back to Harvard for some basic economics courses.

Government is not a producer of economic growth, it is a consumer.  Where do these salaries come from for public service workers?  Taxes and debt of course.  In 2009 under the Obama administration the average private sector job paid $40k per year and the average public sector job paid $70k per year.  The average government worker makes nearly double what the private sector does.

I’m not saying that we don’t need policemen, firemen and teachers, but we do need to be able to pay for them.  And the private sector is the economic growth engine of not only the US, but the world.  The taxes must come from somewhere and without product entrepreneurs and investors to pay the bill, debt is the only option.  We must turn this around.  We are creating wrong incentives and a generation of young people thinking government jobs are where its at.

If we continue to see growth in the public sector and decline in the private sector that can only mean increased taxation for the entrepreneurs and investors.  We will see a brain drain in the US of massive proportions.  It is possible the government is going to limit your ability to work, invest or own assets outside of the US.  This is a scary concept to me.  This is the destruction of liberty.

Now is the time to act to protect your wealth.  You must create an asset protection plan to protect you and your family.  There are numerous ways, regardless of the nature of your assets, to protect them offshore or domestically.  But you need to act now while this is still an option.  Live well.