2024: A Year of Politicians Scheming to Shame Seniors for Not Eating Cat Food.
Bipartisan Bullshit on the Agenda
Our elders are in the spotlight these days, what with AARP sponsoring the upcoming Rolling Stones tour and insurance companies begging us to sign up for their Three Card Monte also known as Medicare Supplemental Insurance.
President Biden’s age is supposedly a big deal, the alternative being a guy who’s one prime rib dinner away from cardiac arrest and promises to end democracy.
What this “age question” is really about are the corporate behemoths willing to shred the Bill of Rights in order to stop a Democratic administration from enforcing rules and laws they don’t like. (Like monopoly, hidden charges, labor and environmental guide posts.)
Now, some are trumpeting predictions of Social Security’s impending insolvency a decade from now with variations of holding current recipients to blame. Today’s young people, we’re being told, are facing a grim future as the well goes dry.
Of course, the real issue of inequality in the United States isn’t the young vs the old; it’s the rich versus the rest of us. But you wouldn’t know it from the firehose of falsehoods drowning out our perceptions about the future, courtesy of bipartisan fiscal hawks and their enablers in the media.
Almost all the calls for reform of Social Security and Medicare include presumptions that just aren’t true. The AARP’s 10 Social Security Myths That Refuse to Die is a good place to start understanding what concerned fiscal hawks don’t want you to understand.
Number One on the hit list of dire warnings is an oldie but a goodie — Social Security is doomed, destined for “bankruptcy” just over the horizon.
Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik explains:
…an old yarn about a “generational war” in the country has been making the rounds lately.
Over just the last four weeks, the idea that America is subsidizing its seniors at the expense of future generations has surfaced in the Washington Post (“ Why we’re borrowing to fund the elderly while neglecting everyone else”), the Wall Street Journal (“ Older Americans Are Better Off Than Ever”) and twice in the New York Times (“For the Good of the Country, Older Americans Should Work More and Take Less,” and “ Older Americans Are Winning the Battle of the Generations”).
These pieces would be instructive for policymakers, if they were true. But they’re not true.
Rather, they’re all variations on an old meme known as “the undeserving poor,” which has been commonly deployed to imply that the recipients of government assistance are layabouts and malingerers sucking up resources from hardworking taxpayers. In this case, the targets can be defined as “the undeserving old.”
The proposed path of this quadrennial hubbub is always the same: some kind of theoretically unbiased bi-partisan commission. This is political-speak for avoiding the wrath of voters and giving cover for the plethora of private institutions’ proposals aiming to reduce the “burden” of retirement for the unfortunates who end up not-wealthy.
And, proponents argue, a commission is the only path to overcoming a filibuster.
There are three schools of thought on fixing this in a manner capable of winning Republican votes.
Raise the age or otherwise tighten eligibility: billionaires like Warren Buffet have no problem working into their eighties and above, why shouldn’t the rest of us get to spend a few more years making them wealthier? Also, the predicted benefit for raising the retirement age fails to get social security to solvency in the next decade.
Privatize it: This would be some variation of the 401(k) path, popularized during the eighties. We’re supposed to ignore the fact that defined contribution programs continue to exacerbate the wealth gap; for those in the bottom 90% of earners magnificent failure are the words that come to mind. Playing the market with savings for these folks is a dangerous gamble, especially when considering –as is true with casinos– the house nearly always wins.
Means test it: This is the path that reactionaries think they can sucker Democrats into supporting. Never mind that, in any practicable form, this also fails to fix the program’s balance sheet; means testing changes the essential nature of Social Security, making it a welfare program. And we all know how much Republicans like to cut “welfare.”.
The basis for one of the problems in social security stems from a Congressional decision to add cost of living increases based on the Consumer Price Index; this increased outflow was supposed to be paid for by taxing social security.
The present day “cap” on taxable earnings makes for a regressive tax structure; a wealthier earner with three times the amount of income of a middle class worker pays only twice as much taxes to social security.
The other part of the “Social Security crisis” is the ballooning cost of Medicare. If you thought getting the Affordable Care Act passed was a challenge, wait until you see the obstacles in fixing this major health care program. We pay more and get less for health care than other industrialized nations, while unprecedented profits are the norm in the medical industrial complex.
President Obama made compromises with the insurance industry to make his concept doable; just about any reform that would challenge burgeoning costs from Medicare would involve “taking” from the Healthcare Industrial Complex.
The simple act of allowing the government to pay realistic prices for drugs under the program turned into a political crisis. Congressman Scott Peters was seen locally as an obstructionist as the Biden administration sought to enact broad legislation lowering drug prices due to his advocacy (and receipt of campaign contributions) for the medical industries in his district.
Eventually, Peter’s watered down language/framework was included as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. The legislation as passed will save Medicare $300 million over a decade; the original proposal would have saved $450 million, but, according to Peters, had no chance of passing the Senate.
While his office took a victory lap for the passage of such legislation, the devil is in the details, with many provisions set in the future. God only knows what the Freedom Caucus will decide to undo should they have sway in the House of Representatives.
Suffice it to say, I would advise carefully watching Rep. Peter’s involvement with proposing reforms for Social Security and Medicare.
Here’s Grace Segers at the New Republic:
Representative Scott Peters, the Democratic co-sponsor of a bill that would create a bipartisan, bicameral commission, including outside experts, told me ahead of the hearing that it was difficult for one party to solve the problem. For example, while Democratic Representative John Larson has introduced a bill to keep Social Security funded, that measure did not make it through the House Ways and Means Committee, even when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. Not touching Social Security is a “cruel lie,” argued Peters.
“If you want to cut Social Security, what you do is nothing,” Peters said. “But if you want to save Social Security, if you want to save benefits, the sooner we do [take action], the better chance we’ll have.”
But Representative Brendan Boyle, the ranking Democrat on the committee, noted during the hearing that the conclusions of a fiscal commission—particularly regarding Social Security—will eventually need to be acted upon by a potentially recalcitrant Congress.
Cutting programs that benefit the public is a political choice. America has more than enough resources to meet all its social needs, of all generations. It has not done so because those who wield power in government have chosen to protect the interests of a few billionaires.
The excuses for making such poor choices are many, and mostly untrue. While Republicans are wetting their pants over the debt limit, it’s important to remember that those obligations have receded under Democratic administrations, and increased when their guys run the Oval office.
As Hiltzik points out, the $12 billion in annual costs for enhancing the child tax credit was more than dwarfed by the $150 billion annual cost of the tax breaks Trump gave the wealthy.
Understanding that the interests of the wealthy all-too-often take first place in so many elements of society is key to building back a better America with so many parts ravaged by a half century of trickle down economics and its variants.
A bi-partisan bunch of politicians are going to try and convince us that it’s necessary to spend our food dollars on cat food in order to save the country. It’s more important than ever to make them make better choices.
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Monday Links for Enlightenment
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Representation for the Ages - Adhering to the tenets of a liberal democracy matters more than age. From Yes! Magazine’s fabulous winter issue focused on elders.
Liberal democracies rest on egalitarian principles of fair distribution of wealth, income, and power as embodied by civil rights, civil liberties, inclusiveness, and equality before the law. These are achieved through free and fair elections, free speech and press, and constitutional courts, sustained by a separation of powers and checks and balances on those powers.
When these tenets are at risk, social movements arise to demand their realization. Right-wing populists may form movements to undermine them in favor of a minority rule that subverts liberal democratic values and favors authoritarian rule.
A liberal democracy, such as the U.S. ostensibly is, demands that our elected representatives remain responsive to principles and to social movements when those principles are unmet or at risk. Age limits are irrelevant to these objectives. After all, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, both of whom are relatively young, embrace Christian Nationalism, in opposition to the principles of a liberal democracy. Growing numbers of elected officials, particularly Republican ones, appear to be adopting the idea of minority rule over democracy.
So let’s put ageism in the trash bin of illiberal discrimination where it belongs. Instead, let’s judge fitness for elected office by a candidate’s demonstrated ability to respond to the needs of the majority of people, expressed through the principles of liberal democracy and democratic social movements.
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Unabated - How a single word can derail climate progress Via Bill McKibben, writing about UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres at the COP28 meeting in the UAE on climate change
What Guterres is trying to head off is the fossil fuel industry scam de xxxx decade. It’s abundantly clear that coal, oil and gas are breaking the climate system; it’s also abundantly clear that the people who own coal, oil and gas reserves don’t care. In an effort to keep burning them, so they can continue to collect the returns, they propose building vast engineering projects alongside fossil-fuel generating plants, to capture the carbon dioxide from the exhaust stream. That is, they want to “abate” the damage of their product….
…The point of the COP—the point of all climate efforts—should not be to produce a deal. Let me repeat myself. The point of climate negotiations should not be to produce a deal, no matter how many pixels are spilled about that prospect over the next two weeks. It’s to stop the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And Guterres is right: there’s one way to do that, and it’s renewable energy. Phase out fossil fuels period, and stat.
Everything else is just smoke.
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‘Medical Freedom’ Activists Take Aim at New Target: Childhood Vaccine Mandates Via the New York Times
Today, 2,100 Mississippi schoolchildren are officially exempt from vaccination on religious grounds. Five hundred more are exempt because their health precludes vaccination. Dr. Daniel P. Edney, the state health officer, warns that if the total number of exemptions climbs above 3,000, Mississippi will once again face the risk of deadly diseases that are now just a memory.
“For the last 40 years, our main goal has been to protect those children at highest risk of measles, mumps, rubella, polio,” Dr. Edney said in an interview, “and that’s those children that have chronic illnesses that make them more vulnerable.” He called the ruling “a very bitter pill for me to swallow.”
Mississippi is not an isolated case. Buoyed by their success at overturning coronavirus mandates, medical and religious freedom groups are taking aim at a new target: childhood school vaccine mandates, long considered the foundation of the nation’s defense against infectious disease.