The Fortune 500 edition of Fortune magazine features an Allan Sloan column questioning President Obama’s proposals targeting retirement savings.

President Obama’s proposal to limit the value of 401(k)s, pensions, and other tax-favored retirement accounts to about $3.4 million certainly sounds reasonable. After all, at a time of big budget deficits, we shouldn’t subsidize “the rich” with tax breaks, should we?

But when you look a little closer — especially when you look at the value of President Obama’s taxpayer-funded retirement benefits — you might think a little differently about what “rich” means. For starters, the point at which Obama wants to eliminate your ability to deduct retirement account contributions isn’t actually the $3.4 million in his budget proposal — that’s just an estimate. The real number is how much a couple age 62 would have to pay for an annuity that yields $205,000 a year. That $3.4 million — which applies to the combined values of your pension and retirement accounts — is subject to a sharp downward change in the future because annuity issuers charge significantly less for an annuity when interest rates are higher than they do today, with rates at rock-bottom levels.

I’ll grant you that $205,000 a year — the current IRS maximum for what a pension fund can pay a recipient — is serious money in many places. But it doesn’t buy you a rich retirement lifestyle in, say, Manhattan, N.Y., where 205K is equivalent to only 88K in Manhattan, Kans. The Manhattan-Manhattan distinction, from Money’s cost-of-living comparator, is an example of the difference between being rich statistically and being rich in reality.

Second, I can’t get past Obama wanting to limit savers to only about half the value of what he stands to get from his post-presidential package. Based on numbers from Vanguard Annuity Access, I value his package at more than $6.6 million. …

… That’s right, $6.6 million. And that doesn’t include the IRAs in which Obama has been socking away the $50,000-a-year maximum, or the $18,000 (plus cost of living) a year he will get at age 62 for his service in the Illinois senate, or any other benefits he or his wife may realize from past or future jobs.