One for Alanis myRA-sette - Isn't It Ironic?

There's some scuttlebutt out there that the various "ironies" in Alanis Morisette's "Ironic" aren't ironies at all. Well, I think the Administration has given us a facially nice but truly ironic new proposal. The myRA proposal would allow people to set up starter accounts invested in Savings Bonds.

But does anyone recall that the Department of Labor is so adverse to undiversified fixed-income investments that the DOL folks quite specifically refused to allow money-market and stable-value alternatives as QDIAs? Why? Because of a concern that participants defaulted into such alternatives would be on the wrong end of the continuum of potential long-term returns, that's why.

And so what does the administration do? In the name of retirement savings and the encouragement thereof, a program is proposed pursuant to which the only possible investment is a . . . Savings Bond. Now I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad idea. Nor am I saying that I think the QDIA regs. are a particularly good idea in this regard. In fact, I personally don't think that the QDIA regs. should've shut down MM/SV as an alternative. (The timing of the adoption of that approach turned out to have a deleterious and in some cases possibly tragic effect on a number of participants' retirement savings. The DOL was not moved to change the approach in any meaningful way, notwithstanding that Series of Unfortunate Events.)

But, c'mon - regardless of where one comes out on QDIAs, on the one hand, and myRAs, on the other, the same government really shouldn't be pursuing two diametrically opposed policies simultaneously. Indeed, aren't the 401(k) participants who don't make investment elections - people for whom the QDIA rules are there - pretty much members of the same target audience as the one to which the myRA proposal is directed? At the least, if only for the sake of consistency, let's massage the QDIA rules so that MM/SV is a valid alternative for the first $X that goes into the QDIA. Or, conversely, let's change the direction of the myRA proposal to provide for some amount of diversification.

In any event, it seems to me that there should at least be some kind of high-level review before the myRA thing goes too far down the road, so as to try to ensure that the various retirement policies that are being encouraged by our federal government are sufficiently (*shudder*) coordinated. To have a non-MM/SV bent be so harshly entrenched in the QDIA regs., and then to launch a key (State of the Union, even!) initiative that provides exclusively for Savings Bond investment, strikes me as irreconcilable or, at least, just a little bit . . . ironic.