Unsilent Generation

Entries categorized as ‘Social Security’

Meet the Real Death Panels: The Truth About Age-Based Health Care Rationing

July 12, 2010 · 3 Comments

The latest issue of Mother Jones includes an article by me about the controversy over age-based health care rationing, which got transformed by the right into government “death panels.” Unfortunately, liberals have fallen into a different trap, because they refuse to take on the real enemies of affordable health care for all: the insurance companies, drug manufacturers, and other profiteers of our private health care system.

As a result, old people are being asked if we would be willing to give up some expensive, life-sustaining treatment so that our grandchildren can have health care. This is a bogus question, and a bogus “choice.” The real question, as I say in the article, is whether we should give up the treatment “so some WellPoint executive can take another expensive vacation, so Pfizer can book $3 billion in annual profits instead of $2 billion, or so private hospitals can make another campaign contribution to some gutless politician.”

It’s a long article, and I’m including just the opening here, with a link at the end to continue reading at the Mother Jones web site. Or you can read the whole thing at MotherJones.com by clicking here. And if you’re one of those geezers who still likes reading print and turning pages, the July/August issue is on newsstands now.

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From Mother Jones, July/August 2010

There’s a certain age at which you cease to regard your own death as a distant hypothetical and start to view it as a coming event. For me, it was 67—the age at which my father died. For many Americans, I suspect it’s 70—the age that puts you within striking distance of our average national life expectancy of 78.1 years. Even if you still feel pretty spry, you suddenly find that your roster of doctor’s appointments has expanded, along with your collection of daily medications. You grow accustomed to hearing that yet another person you once knew has dropped off the twig. And you feel more and more like a walking ghost yourself, invisible to the younger people who push past you on the subway escalator. Like it or not, death becomes something you think about, often on a daily basis.

Actually, you don’t think about death, per se, as much as you do about dying—about when and where and especially how you’re going to die. Will you have to deal with a long illness? With pain, immobility, or dementia? Will you be able to get the care you need, and will you have enough money to pay for it? Most of all, will you lose control over what life you have left, as well as over the circumstances of your death?

These are precisely the preoccupations that the right so cynically exploited in the debate over health care reform, with that ominous talk of Washington bean counters deciding who lives and dies. It was all nonsense, of course—the worst kind of political scare tactic. But at the same time, supporters of health care reform seemed to me too quick to dismiss old people’s fears as just so much paranoid foolishness. There are reasons why the death-panel myth found fertile ground—and those reasons go beyond the gullibility of half-senile old farts.

While politicians of all stripes shun the idea of health care rationing as the political third rail that it is, most of them accept a premise that leads, one way or another, to that end. Here’s what I mean: Nearly every other industrialized country recognizes health care as a human right, whose costs and benefits are shared among all citizens. But in the United States, the leaders of both political parties along with most of the “experts” persist in treating health care as a commodity that is purchased, in one way or another, by those who can afford it. Conservatives embrace this notion as the perfect expression of the all-powerful market; though they make a great show of recoiling from the term, in practice they are endorsing rationing on the basis of wealth. Liberals, including supporters of President Obama’s health care reform, advocate subsidies, regulation, and other modest measures to give the less fortunate a little more buying power. But as long as health care is viewed as a product to be bought and sold, even the most well-intentioned reformers will someday soon have to come to grips with health care rationing, if not by wealth then by some other criteria.

In a country that already spends more than 16 percent of each GDP dollar on health care (PDF), it’s easy to see why so many people believe there’s simply not enough of it to go around. But keep in mind that the rest of the industrialized world manages to spend between 20 and 90 percent less per capita and still rank higher than the US in overall health care performance. In 2004, a team of researchers including Princeton’s Uwe Reinhardt, one of the nation’s best known experts on health economics, found that while the US spends 134 percent more than the median of the world’s most developed nations, we get less for our money—fewer physician visits and hospital days per capita, for example—than our counterparts in countries like Germany, Canada, and Australia. (We do, however, have more MRI machines and more cesarean sections.)

Where does the money go instead? By some estimates, administration and insurance profits alone eat up at least 30 percent of our total health care bill (and most of that is in the private sector—Medicare’s overhead is around 2 percent). In other words, we don’t have too little to go around—we overpay for what we get, and we don’t allocate our spending where it does us the most good. “In most [medical] resources we have a surplus,” says Dr. David Himmelstein, cofounder of Physicians for a National Health Program. “People get large amounts of care that don’t do them any good and might cause them harm [while] others don’t get the necessary amount.”

Looking at the numbers, it’s pretty safe to say that with an efficient health care system, we could spend a little less than we do now and provide all Americans with the most spectacular care the world has ever known. But in the absence of any serious challenge to the health-care-as-commodity system, we are doomed to a battlefield scenario where Americans must fight to secure their share of a “scarce” resource in a life-and-death struggle that pits the rich against the poor, the insured against the uninsured—and increasingly, the old against the young.

For years, any push to improve the nation’s finances—balance the budget, pay for the bailout, or help stimulate the economy—has been accompanied by rumblings about the greedy geezers who resist entitlement “reforms” (read: cuts) with their unconscionable demands for basic health care and a hedge against destitution. So, too, today: Already, President Obama’s newly convened deficit commission looks to be blaming the nation’s fiscal woes not on tax cuts, wars, or bank bailouts, but on the burden of Social Security and Medicare. (The commission’s co-chair, former Republican senator Alan Simpson, has declared, “This country is gonna go to the bow-wows unless we deal with entitlements.”)

Old people’s anxiety in the face of such hostile attitudes has provided fertile ground for Republican disinformation and fearmongering. But so has the vacuum left by Democratic reformers. Too often, in their zeal to prove themselves tough on “waste,” they’ve allowed connections to be drawn between two things that, to my mind, should never be spoken of in the same breath: death and cost.

Click here to the rest at MotherJones.com.

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Categories: Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Medicare · Obama Administration · Social Security · budget / tax policy · corporations · death / end of life care and choices · drug industry · financial crisis / recession · generations / intergenerational issues · health care · health insurance industry · lobbying · media · right wing
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Petition to Stop the Entitlement-Cutting “Catfood Commission”

July 12, 2010 · 5 Comments

Readers of Unsilent Generation may be interested in a new online petition directed at members of Congress, concerning the work of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility of Reform, which I’ve written about here many times before. Here is the introduction to the petition, which was started by Alternet. You can read the text of the petition, and sign it, here at Change.org. 

Right-Wing “Deficit Hawks” and their enablers are on a march to destroy the social safety net we built for our seniors and retirees. Shockingly, some of the most notorious advocates are actually in charge of the presidential commission that will soon determine the future of Social Security and Medicare. We need to stop them in their tracks! Join us in calling on Congress to Stop the Catfood Commission.

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has been dubbed by progressives the “Catfood Commission” because its goal appears to be cutting benefits so drastically that retirees will only be able to afford to eat pet food. It’s hard to tell exactly what the commission is planning because its meetings are closed to the public and the press. Based on past statements and the background of its members the proposals are likely to include raising the retirement age to 70, turning large portions of Social Security over to Wall Street, and cutting Medicare benefits.

The commission’s co-chairman Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, has stated he believes the founders of the Social Security program never expected anyone to actually live to 65 and collect. “People just died,” he has said. “Social Security was never [for] retirement.” Erskine Bowles, the other co-chairman, negotiated a secret but ultimately unsuccessful deal between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich to cut Social Security benefits. Any chances that the commission would make cuts to the US defense budget in its pursuit of fiscal responsibility seem slim owing to the fact that the CEO of Honeywell, a major defense contractor, is a member of the panel.

We can’t sit back and count on a Democratic-controlled Congress to protect our social safety net. Just a day before the July 4th holiday weekend, the House of Representatives passed a measure that would guarantee an up-or-down vote on the Catfood Commission’s recommendations in the current session of Congress if they pass the Senate. With this measure House Speaker Nancy Pelosi relinquished her power to prevent the vote from coming to the floor.

Your representatives need to hear from you NOW.  Let’s stop the Catfood Commission from raiding the Social Security trust fund and slashing medical benefits for current and future retirees.

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Categories: Congress · Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Medicare · Obama Administration · Social Security · Wall Street / financial industry · age discrimination · budget / tax policy · financial crisis / recession · generations / intergenerational issues · poverty · right wing
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The Peterson Foundation’s Retirement Plan: Debtors Prisons

June 11, 2010 · 3 Comments

For readers interested in the emerging entitlement wars, and the insidious influence of Pete Peterson’s anti-entitlement campaign on the public debate (and, apparently, on Obama’s Deficit Commission), yesterday’s post on “Entitled to Know,” the blog of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, needs no introduction. I’m quoting the post in full, but you can click through to the original post to watch the segment on CNBC–and while you’re there, subscribe to the blog to receive the latest information on these issues. 

Apparently, these are the “good-old days” our nation’s fiscal hawks relish.  The Peterson Foundation’s David Walker co-hosted CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning (personally, we yearn for the good-old days when so-called “news” shows were hosted by journalists—not partisan advocates—but that’s another debate). 

The discussion followed the classic Peterson Foundation talking points—government bad, business good—but ultimately led to a nostalgic reminiscence for the good old days when Americans faced debtors prisons and had no sense of “entitlement” (presumably to the Social Security and Medicare benefits workers have funded for their entire working lives):

“The fact of the matter is we have to change how we do things. We are on an imprudent and unsustainable path in a number of ways. You talk about debtors prisons, we used to have debtors prisons, now bankruptcy is no taint. Bankruptcy is an exit strategy. Our society and our culture have changed. We need to get back to opportunity and move away from entitlement. We need to be able to provide reasonable risk but hold people accountable when they do imprudent things…it’s pretty fundamental.”… (David Walker, Peterson Foundation, CNBC Jun 10, 2010)

Now, maybe in the Peterson Foundation’s circle of Wall Street types and multi-billionaires, bankruptcy is an exit strategy, but for millions of middle-class Americans bankruptcy is, in fact, a life-altering and often debilitating choice.  As for pitting “opportunity” vs “entitlement”—that’s classic Peterson Foundation messaging designed to convince us that America’s seniors are somehow riding high on the hog and soaking taxpayers with all of their “entitlements”. 

Of course, these fiscal hawks never mention that fact that the government doesn’t pay for those “entitlements”, American workers do. It’s not the government’s money…it’s not Wall Street’s money…and those so-called “entitlements” have been paid for by you and me.  The truth is, retirees are entitled to receive the benefits they’ve been promised; however, fiscal hawks like David Walker would apparently rather roll back the clock, ignore those promises, and build more debtor’s prisons.

Categories: Medicare · Obama Administration · Social Security · budget / tax policy · generations / intergenerational issues · media · pensions / retirement funds
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On Memorial Day in Normandy, Evidence of What We Won–and Lost

May 31, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Photo: Eisenhower National Historic Site, National Park Service

On June 5, 1944, the eve of the largest invasion in history, General Dwight Eisenhower visited the English airfield where paratroopers were preparing to take off for their drop into France. “Quit worrying, General,” one of the soldiers told him. “We’ll take care of this thing for you.’’ The following day, 175,000 men landed on the beaches and fields of Normandy.

For children growing up in Washington, D.C., shushed into silence behind the blackout curtains while our parents bent over radios bringing the long-awaited announcement of the attack, it was all beyond  comprehension–save that every little boy was climbing into a tree to pretend he was flying his Spitfire over the Channel, or parachuting into the French countryside.

At age seven, I was one of those boys. Last week I had the good fortune to meet another member of my generation, whose experience of D-Day was something quite different. His name is Pierre Bernard, and he is retired to his family’s farm in the village of Maisons, a stone’s throw from the beaches that became the site of what the French call the Débarquement. In the spring of 1944, Pierre was twelve; with his parents and siblings, he worked the farm and waited for the Allied troops to arrive and free them from Nazi occupation. When that day finally came, Pierre recalls, the Germans simply vanished. British and then American troops soon passed through the village, moving quickly inland. His family was luckier than many others: Some 12,000 French civilians were killed during the battle for Normandy, along with more than 75,000 troops on both sides.

Today, long retired from his job as a cook in Paris, Pierre oversees a bed and breakfast in his old stone farmhouse. He’s never learned to use a computer, so his daughters help arrange who is to come, while Pierre, along with his two dogs, goes out each morning to bring back fresh baguettes and croissants. He serves them along with the jams and pates he makes himself, and sits quietly at the head of the family table, contentedly watching his guests eat breakfast.  And he’ll gladly trade war stories with a visitor who, like himself, is too young to have fought, but old enough to remember.

Normandy today still inspires awe at the courage of the men who stormed Fortress Europe: Omaha Beach, so wide and unprotected; the cliffs of Point du Hoc, higher and steeper than I could have imagined. But by now, the genuine remnants of the war—half-buried German bunkers, wrecked ships, and thousands of well-tended graves—are outnumbered by nostalgic renderings of the real thing: Army surplus stores are filled with Eisenhower jackets, berets, and rucksacks (many of them supplied by German companies). Towns compete for tourists–and a place in history—with tanks on their village squares and little museums dedicated to every aspect of “Jour J.” In Sainte-Mère-Église, where an American paratrooper famously got caught on the church steeple, a dummy is suspended from a parachute to commemmorate  the event. Then there are the British and American visitors tearing around in rented World War II jeeps, windshields down, and even a half-ton olive drab truck.  They look far too young to be veterans; too young even to have been alive at the time. The men and women who fought that war are fast disappearing (some 850 U.S. WW II vets die every day, according to the VA), and those who lived through it as children are now well into our old age.  

I was struck by how different Pierre’s old age in France is from mine in the United States—not because of anything that happened during the war, but because of what happened afterwards. In the postwar years, along with most other European countries (victors and vanquished alike), France implemented guaranteed pensions as well as national health care. Under a social welfare system that epitomizes what’s derisively referred to in the U.S. as the “Nanny State,” the average worker in France retires at age 60 on a full pension with complete medical care and various tax breaks. (And that’s after years of working 35-hour weeks, with two-month vacations.)

And what about aging Americans–including the waning ranks of the “greatest generation” that came before mine, who helped free the French and the rest of Europe, and then financed the continent’s recovery through the Marshall Plan? What can we expect? The most minimal of public pension systems, which was created before the war and has been under attack ever since; a private pension system that is now a shell of collapsing structures; personal savings decimated by Wall Street; and a partial and increasingly expensive health care system. More and more of us plan to work quite literally until we die–that is, if we can manage to keep our jobs, since we have little protection against age discrimination and no job security of any sort. In America, the war fought by “Citizen Soldiers” made our world all too safe for wealth and corporate power, often at the expense of the very men and women who won it.

In France, conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy has been chipping away at the Nanny State. His latest scheme—to raise the retirement age to 62—brought mass demonstrations across the country last week, and threats from the still-powerful unions. But even if Sarkozy’s latest initiative succeeds, as it well may, France’s elders will still be better off than their American counterparts have ever been.

Here in the U.S., we face a political juggernaut—most recently manifested in Obama’s “debt commission”–intent on cutting Social Security benefits, raising the costs of Medicare, extending the formal retirement age from 65 to 67 and beyond, and further tying our retirement and that of future generations to the vicissitudes of the securities markets through 401Ks and IRAs. Few voices are raised in protest against this attack on old-age entitlements. In fact, it seems to be one of the only true examples of bipartisanship in American politics, now that the Democratic Party, which once fought to build what social safety net we have, has collapsed into the arms of Wall Street. I expect it will progress with no more difficulty than “welfare reform,” in which another Democratic administration gutted our meager provisons for the poor.

In a Washington Post op-ed last Sunday, American Enterprise Institute president Arthur C. Brooks declared that “America’s new culture war” is a “struggle between two competing visions of the country’s future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise–limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution.” If only this were remotely true.  In fact, that battle was lost long ago—if it was ever fought at all.

Perhaps I only imagine that Pierre’s life is more tranquil than mine because he enjoys the security that comes with “European-style statism,” while my own well-being remains “determined by market forces.” But I don’t think so. Sixty-six years ago, as a small boy playing pilot in the lush green trees of a Washington spring, I could not have guessed that Pierre, waiting in his farmhouse nestled in the hedgerows of Normandy for the jeeps and tanks of the First Army, would someday become a symbol not only of my country’s greatest victory, but of its saddest defeat.

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Categories: Medicare · Obama Administration · Social Security · Wall Street / financial industry · World War II · economy · generations / intergenerational issues · health care · international · older workers · pensions / retirement funds · unions / labor · veterans
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Roszak’s “Making of an Elder Culture”

May 21, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Few may remember it, but before the advent of Social Security in the 1930s and Medicare in the 1960s, the old were widely viewed as a spent force. Nobody talked about happy retirement, in part because, these were people who remembered only too well the Depression. Few looked forward to leisure worlds because the poor house was too recent in so many people’s minds. Before old age entitlements, tending to the old was viewed as the job of the family. If you didn’t have a family, then it was charity–you joined the begging class. And even if you did have a family, you lived knowing that the young and middle aged couldn’t wait to get rid of you.

The same is more or less true today. Some days it seems the entire city of Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, is on a mission against the old. Of course, nobody would ever say that. But there is a war against the old going on here in the form of a vigorous, largely uncontested attack on entitlements—a fighting word for conservatives and conservative Democrats who simply can’t stand Roosevelt’s New Deal, Johnson’s Great Society, and everything the stood for.

In his book The Making of an Elder Culture, recently published by New Society, Theodore Roszak, the cultural historian who more than three decades ago wrote The Making of a Counter Culture, sets out some of the grim history of old people in American society, and in doing so places elders within our current political world.

The old were in fact the worst victims of industrialism, primarily because they were not deemed worth saving. They belonged to that class of unwelcome dependents called the impotent poor—those who could not provide for themselves…as comfortable as many middle-class elders may be today, they share with all older people a long sad history of bleak mistreatment they would do well to remember. For generations the old have suffered wrongs inflicted on them by harsh public policy and often by their nearest and dearest….in the modern western world where the old have been seen as the claim of the dreary past upon the bustling forces of progress.

In the early days of the industrial revolution, Roszak writes, “aged workers became poor. The workhouse and county home were little better than the concentration camp. They were fed gruel, bedded down on straw or bare wood…they had no place to turn  save for their children…They were pictured as withered, toothless, bent, lean.’’

You must remember that as recently as 40 or 50 years ago, there was no senior lobby. The political pros never talked about a senior vote. Today all that has changed–yet Roszak sees in today’s entitlement wars a serious threat to the well-being of elders.

In the same way that organized labor was once regarded as a potentially tyrannical force able to achieve its own selfish ends, entitlement critics began characterizing seniors as a threat to the democratic process…

Nobody of any political stripe wants to risk the charge of granny-bashing,but the facts are clear. In the United States, gaining even  modest degrees of security in retirement has been a struggle against business leaders, political conservatives, and free market economists for whom money is the measure of all things.

Always remember, Roszak says, “the well-to-do are the first to tell us that there is not enough to go around.”

In his book, Roszak envisions a society in which rather tan cutting social programs for the old, we will extend them to younger people. Noone would resent Medicare, for example, if we had universal health care for Americans of all ages. He sees a future where the old and the young join to create a new world devoted to common humane goals: ending poverty at all ages, assuring education–laying the planks of a new society on the New Deal and LBJ’s social welfare project. Such ideas face an uphill battle in today’s political culture–but are no less inspiring for that fact.

I’ll be writing more about Roszak’s work in future posts.

Categories: Great Depression · Social Security · age discrimination · corporations · economy · elder books / arts · generations / intergenerational issues · health care · older workers · pensions / retirement funds · poverty · radical geezers
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Reader Response: How About Going After the Real “Fat Cats” Before Attacking Elders?

May 7, 2010 · 2 Comments

This morning I received a comment from Elizabeth Rogers in response to my posts about Senator Alan Simpson, the octagenarian elder-basher who co-chairs Obama’s Deficit Commission. Simpson has been making news with his comments about ”fat cat” geezers who cling to their government handouts while younger generations suffer. I want to share it with everyone because Ms. Rogers gets to the heart of the whole entitlements question in a simple and direct way.

There’s a good chance this commission will end up proposing cuts in Medicare, along with steps towards privatizing  parts of Social Security. These have been heartbeat issues for conservatives running all the way back to the creation of Social Security in the New Deal, and has only grown since Congress created Medicare in the 1960s, after some arm twisting by LBJ. Doing away with these entitlement programs has been a cherished conservative idea, right alongside ridding the nation of  ties to the UN, ending the income tax, and abolishing the Department of Education, to name but a few.

In addition to destroying the social safety net, the war on entitlements serves to distract attention from the real causes of the inflated deficit. Elizabeth Rogers suggests some other sources of deficit-reduction that our politicians might want to consider before they start dipping into our Social Security checks. 

Retired Senator Simpson must travel in a very different crowd of older Americans than my husband and I do! We live in a compact 2 BR condo in the Pacific Northwest. Yes, there’s a gate, but our complex is very definitely occupied by middle class workers and retirees like us. At 73 I’m still working part time and thank my lucky stars that I have a job. My husband, now 80, worked until four years ago (he started working at age 14).

Lexuses? I don’t think so. Our small SUVs are over 10 years old and we hope they last as long as we do. Fat cats? Not exactly, although we do have an overweight feline in our family.

Seriously, although we have some additional resources, Social Security is a significant source of income for us, as I suspect it is for most recipients. That said, we get that the nation’s huge budget deficit is a serious problem.

We’d be willing to pay more taxes if the amount is fair and reasonable, but FIRST, how about: (1) pursuing the offshore bank accounts of billionaire tax evaders, (2) allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans to expire, (3) ending the UNfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are now costing in the trillions; (4) changing our culture’s views on end-of-life care so that Medicare doesn’t continue to spend huge sums on “heroic” measures to “save” those in their last 6 months of life. I have multiple advance directives in place because I have no desire to fall into the hands of the medical-pharmaceutical complex at the end of my life, but even so, I can’t be certain that I won’t. We need to get real about this issue!

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Categories: Bush Administration · Medicare · Obama Administration · Social Security · budget / tax policy · death / end of life care and choices · generations / intergenerational issues · poverty
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Deficit Commission’s Alan Simpson Denounces Fat Cat Geezers

May 6, 2010 · 2 Comments

It’s a little hard to believe that the political professionals within the Whte House (meaning Rahm Emmanuel) knew what they were getting themselves into when they appointed former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson to co-chair the president’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Yes, it’s obvious that the so-called Deficit Commission’s real purpose is to cut old-age entitlements, a move long favored by Simpson, as well as by the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street. But did they really want someone who would be quite so crude and blatant about these intentions–and so whacked out as well?

Simpson has already said that Social Security and Medicare are the reason “this country is gonna go to the bow-wows,” and he wouldn’t be dissuaded from cutting them by AARP or “the Gray Panthers, the Pink Panther, whatever.” But in an interview on Fox News last week, Simpson managed to outdo himself.

Simpson’s latest pronouncements were dissected by Trudy Lieberman, a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review,  who has written some very smart commentary on the truth behind the entitlement “reform” effort. In this latest piece, she even writes about one of my favorite subjects, the phony war between the generations–as she puts it, “Geezers vs. Gen-X-ers.”  The piece is called “More Words of Wisdom on Alan Simpson.” I’m including a substantial excerpt here, but recommend reading the whole thing at the CJR site.

Former Sen. Alan Simpson’s interview on Fox Sunday was a doozy. His usual outspoken, outrageous, colorful self shined through, perhaps as a prelude to the first meeting of the federal deficit reduction commission, which he leads (and about which my colleague Holly Yeager posted the other day). Simpson never makes boring copy, and so far he has been consistently quotable in his remarks. He and his co-chairman, Erskine Bowles, make quite a media pair.

But the press needs to pay attention to what they are saying, because their drive to cut the deficit will affect the financial well-being of every man, woman, and child in America. So far the direction of the media coverage has been driven by their mantra: everything is on the table; no more Mr. Nice Guy when it comes to Social Security and Medicare. The Erskine and Alan show is laying the groundwork for drastically changing Social Security and Medicare in ways that might not be so palatable with the public.

It didn’t take Simpson long to climb on his hobbyhorse—that whatever the commission recommends will not hurt older folks. “Erskine and I are in this one for our grandchildren,” he said. “Somebody said they’re stalking horses for taxes. I’m not a stalking horse for taxes. I’m a stalking horse for my grandchildren.” Simpson told Fox anchor Chris Wallace that whatever “adjustment” is ultimately made, and whatever has been suggested in the way of Social Security reform for the last ten years, “none of that affects anybody over 57.” He said most of his mail was coming from:

“These old cats 70 and 80 years old who are not affected in one whiff. People who live in gated communities and drive their Lexus to the Perkins restaurant to get the AARP discount. This is madness.”

Perhaps Simpson hasn’t looked hard enough in Cody, Wyoming, or in other places where the elderly, particularly women, exist on rather small Social Security incomes. The average monthly benefit for all workers is about $1,150. These people are paying more and more for their health care out of pocket and will continue to do so after reform takes effect. I have spent a lot of my career talking to seniors, and I haven’t seen many living in gated communities, driving fancy cars. Walk down the streets of Torrington, Wyoming, not too far from where the former senator lives, to see the kinds of small, cramped, drafty houses where many of the town’s elderly survive. Some barely have enough for food, let alone gas for the cranky old vehicles they drive.

Once Simpson made his point about the fat cat geezers, Wallace tried to engage about what exactly he had in mind for the under-57 crowd: “You are talking about raising the retirement age, are you talking about higher taxes?” A fair enough question, to which Simpson replied: “I don’t know.” He said there were think tanks all over the country that have talked about how to resolve the Social Security problem and mentioned the 1983 commission that put the program on a sound footing. That commission resolved the problem, he said, “because they had all the facts they needed. So do we.”

If Simpson has all the facts, we’d like to know exactly how many seniors drive Lexuses and live in gated communities. If he doesn’t have the numbers, reporters following this story should pin him down or find out for themselves what the data show before spreading his sound bites far and wide, the way journalists did when Ronald Reagan called black women welfare queens who drove big cars while collecting food stamps.

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Categories: Obama Administration · Social Security · budget / tax policy · economy · financial crisis / recession · generations / intergenerational issues · media · pensions / retirement funds
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Pete Peterson’s Anti-Entitlement Juggernaut

April 27, 2010 · 8 Comments

When Obama’s new deficit commission gets going, it intends to be “partnering“–in the words of executive director Bruce Reed –with outside groups. Among them will be the foundation run by Wall Street billionaire Peter G. Peterson, who on Wednesday will upstage the president with his own fiscal summit in Washington. Obama insists he is keeping an open mind about how to deal with the deficit and national debt–but as I’ve written before, he’s already stacked his own commission with people who lean heavily toward one particular solution: cutting entitlements. And now he is working hand-in-glove with a wealthy private organization whose central purpose is to cut Social Security and Medicare. Talk about foregone conclusions. 

Pete Peterson: Beating a Dead Horse

Peterson, according to Forbes, was the 149th richest man in America last year, with $2.8 billion in assets. During his long career he has been, among other things, CEO of Bell & Howell,  head of Lehman Brothers, a co-founder of the Blackstone Group, and head of the Council on  Foreign Relations. He was Nixon’s Secretary of Commerce, and in 1994 served on a Clinton bipartisan commission on entitlements and tax reform. He launched his own Peter G. Peterson Foundation with a grant of $1 billion.  

A fiscal conservative, Peterson has long been issuing dire warnings about the the nation’s skyrocketing debt. The key cause of the problem, in his analysis, is that entitlement programs–primarily Social Security and Medicare, but Medicaid as well–are out of control; the only solution is to cut them. Peterson is the self-appointed head of what some people have begun to call the “granny bashers,” who argue that greedy geezers are ruining the lives of younger generations with their unconscionable demands for basic healthcare and a hedge against destitution. (Peterson himself is in his eighties–but of course he’s too rich to worry about such things.)  

The granny bashers’ real agenda, of course, is to cut the social safety net programs that they have long abhorred–but they have gained far more ground with their intergenerational inequity claims than they ever would with a straight-out attack on Social Security and Medicare. The majority of the Washington punditry seem to have fallen for it–and so too, apparently, has the White House. A year ago in Newsweek, Peterson wrote: 

For the first time in my memory, the majority of the American people join me in believing that, on our current course, our children will not do as well as we have. For years, I have been saying that the American government, and America itself, has to change its spending and borrowing policies: the tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded entitlements and promises, the dangerous dependence on foreign capital, our pitiful level of savings, the metastasizing health-care costs, our energy gluttony. These structural deficits are unsustainable. Herb Stein, who served alongside me in the Nixon White House as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, once drily observed, “If your horse dies, I suggest you dismount.” And yet, we keep trying to ride this horse. 

In June, according to the Washington Post,  Obama’s deficit commission will be participating in a 20-city electronic town hall meeting, put together by an organization called America Speaks. It is financed by Peterson, along with the MacArthur Foundation and Kellogg Foundation. This is a truly unusual event because it marks the first time a presidential commission’s activities are financed by a private group that has long been lobbying the government on the very subjects the commission is supposed to “study.” 

The Peterson summit is crammed with luminaries in finance and government. First there’s the keynoter, Bill Clinton. Then there’s Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman widely credited with getting us into our current economic mess, and Paul Volcker, his conservative predecessor at the Fed. Robert Rubin, Clinton’s secretary of the Treasury, and another pillar of the current economic debacle, will speak. So will Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, a leading GOP guru, who among other things wants to replace Medicare with a system of vouchers and tax breaks. Judd Gregg, the senior and probably most important conservative senator when it comes to finance, will be featured as well; he is a keen  proponent of Peterson’s entitlement cuts. 

The heavy hitters are all to be interviewed by big names in mainstream media: ABC’s George Stephanopolous will question his old boss Clinton; Leslie Stahl will speak with presidential commission co-chair Erskine Bowles, one of Clinton’s a White House chiefs of staff. Ranked below the big guys are a slew of lesser lights including some liberals like Lawrence Mischel of the Economic Policy Institute, Robert Greenstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, John Podesta of the Center for American Progress (and another former Clinton chief of staff), and former Congressional Budget Office head Alice Rivlin. 

All-in-all, it seems to be dominated by Clinton-era officials, who oversaw much of the Wall Street deregulation that nearly drove the country broke. These are the people who will now try to make up the losses on the backs of the poor and the old by rewriting the hard-won entitlement programs created during the New Deal and the War on Poverty. 

Meanwhile Obama–who seems to have learned nothing about strategy from the health care wars–will not say what he thinks about any of it. Instead, he prefers to sit on the sidelines and see what these people come up with–as if that horse wasn’t already out of the barn.

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Categories: Medicare · Obama Administration · Social Security · Wall Street / financial industry · budget / tax policy · financial crisis / recession · generations / intergenerational issues · lobbying · media
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Simpson to Geezers: Bugger Off

April 27, 2010 · 3 Comments

On Tuesday President Obama formally launched a new commission that is supposed to bring down the national debt, in large part by investigating how entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare, can be cut back.

Obama told reporters at the White House he wouldn’t discuss the options at for bringing down the debt at this point. “We’re not playing that game,’’ Obama said. “I’m not going to say what’s in. I’m not going to say what’s out. I want this commission to be free to do its work.”

 The new commission, which is to file a nonbinding report by Christmas, has two co-chairs. Erskine Bowles, a former investment banker and Clinton chief of staff, is one of them. Alan Simpson, the quirky, conservative, longtime senator from Wyoming, is the other. The commission is supposed to be objective. But Simpson already has signaled that whatever happens, he wants to keep old people out of the process.

You remember the last time we corrected Social Security, and people calling me.  Let me tell you, everything that Bush and Clinton or Obama have suggested with regard to Social Security doesn’t affect anyone over 60, and who are the people howling and bitching the most? The people over 60.  This makes no sense.  You’ve got scrub out (of) the equation the AARP, the Committee for the Preservation of Social Security and Medicare, the Gray Panthers, the Pink Panther, the whatever.

In other words, the geezers should all shut up, since they will all be dead by the  time any entitlement reductions kick in. And what if they wanted to stick up for other old people in generations to come? Well, too bad. By the time those suckers hit retirement age, it’ll be too late to do anything. 

 

Categories: Medicare · Obama Administration · Social Security · budget / tax policy · economy · generations / intergenerational issues · lobbying
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Time for Some Faux Financial Reform

March 29, 2010 · 2 Comments

The pitched battle over health care reform, won with considerable ease as predicted here long ago by the insurance, drug, and associated medical industries, can be viewed as just a warmup act for the fight over  financial reform. As the main event draws near,  eager reportorial eyes are supposed to turn to the awesome spectacle of Ben Bernanke’s Fed policing itself in the interest of protecting consumers. No. This is not a play by Dario Fo.

The base issue here is how corporate America can screw more money out of the middle and lower middle classes. They weren’t about to change health care and they sure as hell are not going to give up their authority over the nation’s wealth.

So what’s this all about? Very simply put, it is about reducing middle class America’s income by cutting entitlements. And that starts with Social Security.

Dave Lindorff on Counterpunch very neatly captures the moment:

The corporate press is weighing in with  dire warnings that this year, six years ahead of what had been predicted only a few years ago, the Social Security system would be paying out more in benefits than it takes in from the payroll tax. The reason for this earlier-than-anticipated event is the Great Recession, the paper explained. 

Well yeah. If you were 62, or 65, and you had lost your job, with no likelihood of it’s coming back, wouldn’t you, once your unemployment checks ran out, opt to start your retirement earlier than planned, so you’d at least have some money coming in each month?  Oh, and with 10 percent of the work force currently unemployed (actually close to 21 percent if you count the people who have given up looking for a nonexistent job, and those who have taken some low-paid part-time work out of desperation), there is a lot less money being paid into the Social Security Trust Fund. So with beneficiaries rising faster than anticipated, and the total national payroll in sharp decline, of course things have gone negative for Social Security earlier than originally anticipated.

So what to do about it?

Hank Paulson and Pete Peterson are both calling for benefit cutbacks, an older retirement age and other attacks on the system. Paulson of course is the the guy who as Treasury Secretary under President George W. Bush, helped engineer the real estate bubble that brought the economy to its knees, and who then engineered the sweet deal that helped his former company, Goldman Sachs, come out of the crisis as the nation’s biggest bank, fattened by tens of billions of taxpayer bailout dollars. Pete Peterson, the former ad exec turned self-described economic guru has been a perpetual doomsayer about Social Security, calling for its privatization.

But really, what’s the crisis?

A wave of Baby Boomers is about to start retiring next year (actually for those born first, in 1946, who decided to retire early at age 62, Baby Boomer retirement began in 2008), but that’s a demographic wave that will eventually pass. In the meantime, financing the benefits for Baby Boomer retirees simply means that current workers–the Baby Boomers’ children and grandchildren–will have to pay more in payroll taxes. Or–and this is what has people like Paulson and Peterson scared–Baby Boomers and their allies among younger workers, may decide to use their unprecedented electoral clout to take those extra tax payments not out of younger workers, but out of their employers. There is, after all, no legal, theoretical or even mystical reason why the Social Security payroll tax should be split 50/50, with half being paid by the worker, and half by the employer. It could easily be a 40/60 split, with the employer paying 50 per cent more than the worker, or even a 30/70 split. That is a political question. Likewise, there is no reason on earth why the payroll tax should be set at the same percentage rate for all income levels, as it is now, instead of progressively calculated, so that high-income workers would pay a higher percentage of income into the fund than low-income workers. And finally, there is no reason why the income subject to the payroll tax (the FICA tax on your W-2 statement) should be capped (currently at $106,800), or why investment income should be exempt.

The so-called Social Security funding “crisis,” which has Republicans and many Democrats warning of the system’s looming “insolvency” as though Social Security were just another AIG, could be solved simply by just eliminating the income cap, and taxing investment income.

Oh, but the conservatives wail, if we raise the payroll tax, America will become uncompetitive, and our economy will collapse.

How then to explain Germany, where social security as a percentage of GDP is much greater than in the US (40 per cent of Germany’s adult population receive some form of government income, whether in the form of retirement payments, unemployment compensation or disability payments–far higher than in the US)? Despite its high social welfare budget, and its high wages, Germany is the second-largest exporter in the world  after China, and despite Germany’s being a huge importer of goods and services, second only to the US, overall, Germany is a net exporter.

Clearly, the problem with America’s economy is not high social security costs, and the “crisis” facing Social Security is not that it is going to “go bankrupt.” It is simply that the corporate interests in America, and the wealthy, don’t want to have to pay for the system. They want the lion’s share of the funding to be paid by ordinary workers and the poor.

Categories: Social Security · Wall Street / financial industry · corporations · economy · financial crisis / recession · pensions / retirement funds · poverty
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