Should I be hurrying to move everything into my Roth?

It wouldn't shock me a bit if they start taxing withdrawals from a Roth as well by the time you're ready to start making distributions. Gotta pay for all these Biden plans somehow.

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let em try...that won't end well.

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What will people do? The ones affected by it have too much to lose to riot in the streets. The goal posts move inch by inch until we look back and say how TF did we get here.

Capital gains rates don't apply to 401k withdrawals, withdrawals are taxed at current income tax rates. This is a key distinction you're missing and you need to get professional help before doing anything further.

I'm not worried about any changes to the Roth's tax treatment going forward. Because the Roth IRA is much newer and has lower contribution limits than the traditional 401k, the total amount the government could get from taxing all existing Roth withdrawals is so small it wouldn't make a difference. I recall a study that said tax all Roth withdrawals would yield a few days of government spending at best, because the Roth is young and contributions were limited to $2,000 as recently as 15 years ago.

Relative to the trillions of built up traditional IRA and 401k balances that must begin RMDs at 70.5 years, 401ks are by far the biggest target, followed by traditional IRAs then Roths a distant third.

You should definitely convert all your traditional qualified accounts to a Roth and in my opinion they'll be safe for a few decades.

Again, to reinforce my point, there just aren't enough people who are good enough with money to have accumulated enough assets outside the traditional IRA to pay income tax on the Roth conversion. If you convert a $1,000,000 IRA, you'll have to write a check for $370,000 to pay the income tax. If you can't do that without eroding the IRA balance itself, you're not really able to retire.

It's much easier to raise income taxes on required RMDs than to invent a whole new way to track cost basis in accounts that have never tracked cost basis before and have existed for decades. The IRS only instituted cost basis tracking for taxable accounts in 2012 and have never tracked it in qualified retirement accounts.

I don't understand how the government would even establish someone's cost basis retroactively for an established 401k over decades all of a sudden. Not to mention numerous consolidations between jobs that all get dumped into a rollover IRA over one's working life.

Responding to OP but covering a few issues here...

1) Roths are going to be safe, so far as they won't be hit with another round of taxation. I absolutely could see the "backdoor" shut down, and honestly, I'm shocked it hasn't been yet. But if you shut that down, then a Roth goes back to being a vehicle that brings in tax revenue today, and really can't be used by the upper class. A dream scenario for the left.

2) Roth is a bet that the marginal tax rate you pay at retirement, is higher than the marginal tax rate you pay today. It may well be that tax rates are higher at your retirement than they are today... but will your marginal rate be higher? Most people at retirement have an annual income that is less than their income when they are working. So maybe in 15 years, the 24 percent bracket becomes 29, and the 15 percent bracket becomes 20. But if your income level today puts you in the 24 percent bracket, but your income at retirement puts you in the now 20 percent bracket, your marginal rate is still lower at retirement.

3) I've always felt it's good to have money in Roth and non-Roth buckets.

In case it wasn't clear the point of this is to decide if I should move the two 401ks from previous jobs into a IRA and then to the Roth. I can't recall, when transfering from a traditional to a Roth is there a max? It doesn't count towards the 6k yrly max correct?

So you think there is no chance of the government coming in and taxing your capital gains?

ETA: The rest of this post didn't really make sense after second read.

Maybe I'm short sighted, but if it's an opportunity to take a tax break now ( standard IRAs, 401ks) or a tax break later ( Roth's) I'll take it while I can. I have no faith that Roth's will forever be nontaxable.