This —about the death of pensions & what happens to older workers—is as shattering & stark as it is common, almost unremarkable. And it speaks to perhaps the central political divide of our times. 1/
Vast numbers of boomers are entering retirement age. Overwhelmingly, have little to no savings. Often, they’re in debt. What is to become of them?
Republicans look at data about earned benefits seniors will receive—Social Security & Medicare—& say that we have a fiscal problem, that costs exceed obligations, & so benefits must be cut. This is Paul Ryan’s central animating belief & cause.
This is a bizarrely blinkered vision. It scans the balance sheet but leaves out the human beings—who, in a democracy, are supposed to be the point.
It’s a view similar to that of corporate raiders who broke the employers’ side of the deal when they shredded the pension system over the past few decades.
Workers agreed to lower compensation because their employers agreed to pay them pension benefits later. Raiders took over, laid off workers, ditched pension agreements. In essence, made money by cheating workers of their due.
Every worker in America has a similar deal with earned benefits. We all pay payroll taxes now, covering Medicare & Social Security for current retirees, based on promise that we’ll get similar benefits down the line.
Now come Paul Ryan and the GOP, doling out tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy—many of them enriched precisely through layoffs & breaking of pension promises—and where do they look for money? Cuts to earned benefits, which they sneer at as “entitlements.”
But earned benefits for retirees are now profoundly vital, precisely because pensions have died and 401ks have utterly failed to take their place.
As the Washington Post notes, half of US families have no retirement account. Among those those who do, for median earners, the median amount saved is $25k.
That’s a rainy day fund, not a retirement plan.
That’s a rainy day fund, not a retirement plan.
Average Social Security benefits are ~$14k per year. For ~60%, that’s more than half their income. For about a quarter, it’s 90% of their income. Those %s are likely to rise.
Remember. Americans work *extremy* hard. Long hours for long years, with short vacations, compared to other industrialized countries. And then, what? What is our social contract?
This is the crux of it. Republicans look at the growing retirement crisis and see only a public promise they can save money by breaking. Democrats should see it for what it is and focus on *increasing* retirement income. Expanding Social Security.
To be clear: when I say Republicans want to cut Social Security (they call it “entitlement reform”), I’m referring to the elected ones. A majority of the Republican *public* wants to *expand* Social Security. So does 87% of Dems. m.huffpost.com/us/entry/12689…
In 2016, a long-term push by activists, organizers, and wonks began to bear fruit, as major Dems including Obama & Hillary joined Warren, Sanders, and others to endorse expansion. Future looked bright. reuters.com/article/us-col…
Even Trump vowed not to cut Soc Sec, Medicare, or Medicaid on the campaign trail. Felt like consensus had shifted left, towards decency and realism.
But Paul Ryan’s gonna Paul Ryan. Even though it’s suicidally unpopular, he wants to go after earned benefits next year. cnbc.com/2017/12/26/pol…
Trump himself seems to have gotten excited about the scheme thanks to the dog-whistle label “welfare reform,” which for him has obvious connotations. washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2…
It is punch-the-wall infuriating that this is the conversation we’re having in 2017 as millions of seniors who should be able to retire are forced into debt and minimum wage jobs in order to afford their medicines and food.
The right conversation to have is the one being led by folks like @aijenpoo and @CaringAcrossGen: how are we going to care for older folks in this century? How are we going to keep our end of the promise, given that they kept theirs?
We should be figuring out how to move more money into the pipeline to support older folks, not plotting to pay out less. That means levying payroll taxes on upper incomes. Another key strategy: welcoming immigrants, who increase the worker/retiree ratio.
In econ & demography, the ratio of “dependents” (people under 14 or over 65) vs people of working age (supposedly 14-65) is called your “dependency ratio.” An aging population = growing dependency ratio = harder to keep dependants out of poverty. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependenc…
To improve your dependency ratio, you can have more kids—which hurts in short term but helps in medium term—and/or increase immigration. Trump’s strategy of slamming immigrants is exactly the wrong one for an aging country like ours. Immigrants help the rest of us.
To slam the door on immigrants, slash earned benefits, and increase incentives for predatory pension-busting corporate raiders, all simultaneously, amounts to a war on seniors.
The visions of the two parties for how—frankly, *whether*—to structure policy to support seniors could not be more starkly opposed. It’s an irony that the party most seniors vote for is the one intent on betraying them.
But although there’s a gulf between the parties, there’s a fluid and robust debate within each party about how far to go. GOP: how much to cut. Dems: whether and how much to expand. (The cutters have been largely beaten back, at least for now.)
All of this lands on the weary 79-year-old shoulders of the full-time minimum wage Walmart greeter in the article that started this thread. A party’s platform can be judged on how it treats that worker.
Work is a source of dignity. But depriving seniors of the right to retire is an indignity that should be alien to the United States of America in the 21st century.
