Tanner was wrong about the debate being over, but the efforts of the 1990s softened the ground for the current onslaught of generational warfare raging in the media, framed as as "the greedy geezers versus the kids." In May 1996, Atlantic Monthly gave Peter G. Peterson 21 pages to describe what the magazine said was the devastating impact of the baby boom generation on Medicare and Social Security. James Glassman, an economics columnist for The Washington Post, argued in late 1995 that "Americans in their twenties and thirties (never mind their children) have little chance of getting decent benefits when they retire, or perhaps any benefits at all."
In pursuing that frame, the media have passed along ideas without adequately exploring what they mean or hearing from other perspectives. For example:
Cutting Social Security and Medicare will save the programs for future generations:
While this is a favorite talking point for the pols and the press, there is another side to the story. It's a "camouflage," says Donna Butts, executive director of Generations United , an advocacy group for children, youth, and older adults. "It's frustrating that some of the people who hide behind the shield to help the next generation are actually hurting it."
If Social Security benefits, already pretty modest-- averaging $1,230 a month for a retired worker at the beginning of 2012--are cut, that means the next generation and perhaps the next will have less guaranteed income to depend on when they too, inevitably, get older. Given that good defined benefit pension plans are being replaced by the more iffy and inadequate 401Ks; given that they will be pushed to pay more for their healthcare, given that the age for collecting full Social Security benefits is already rising; given that the savings rate for most Americans is horrifying--what exactly are the young going to live on when they get older?
Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik summed up their predicament:
The people who will really suffer from gutting Social Security won't be today's seniors, who will escape the worst of the cutbacks--they'll be today's young people, for whom Social Security would become much less supportive when they retire.
The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College found that a bit more than half of American workers 30 and older are on a path that leaves them unprepared for retirement, a point made in a piece by Michael Fletcher in The Washington Post. The Center's director, Alicia Munnell , told him, "There's a mismatch between retirement needs rising and retirement benefits contracting." In other words, just as the elderly start to need more money, they'll have less of it.
Old people are doing very well and don't need the money:
" Social Security has been
But Social Security's success in keeping elders out of poverty hardly means that all 40 million Americans over age 65 are rolling in dough. The
Pockets of poverty, particularly among older women, still exist. "Aging is the gateway to poverty," says Teresa Ghilarducci, a pension expert at The New School in
That's just when the chained CPI --the much talked-about alternative for calculating Social Security cost-of-living increases and one apparently supported by the White House--begins to pinch.
The chained CPI reduces cost-of-living adjustments over time and saves gobs of money for the government. Its effect on seniors as they age is a different matter. The effect compounds as a person gets older, so by the time someone reaches age 85, he or she would have about $1,139 a year less to live on, according to Social Security Works. That may be trivial to Lloyd Blankfein, but a king's ransom to a struggling 85-year-old.
Social Security is a generational program:
The lopsided debate over the past three years has focused almost exclusively on Social Security as a retirement program. The media have virtually ignored what else it does. When you consider the survivors' benefits paid to more than four million widows and widowers, to some two million children whose parents have died, and to breadwinners who become disabled, Social Security becomes more than retirement income. About seven million children live in households that depend on Social Security to support the family. Grandparents are raising thousands of them. In the end, Social Security cuts for grandma and grandpa may affect the money available for food, clothing, after school activities, maybe even college. (It's worth noting that the child's benefit that helped pay for college expenses until age 22 ended long ago.)
A young man I met in Illinois not too long ago, who was about to become a father, told me he had never heard of Social Security survivor's benefits. No one had ever explained that if he died when his child was young, Social Security provided a floor of protection. The Social Security messages from the media had conveyed relentlessly only that the program was in trouble. "It hasn't been shouted loudly enough that Social Security is a system that works for families and all generations," says Butts. "Most of the rhetoric is about retirement. It's amazing how people don't connect the dots."
Indeed they don't. Social Security is a people story if there ever was one, but there have been very few stories about people--the faces that all members of Congress never see. Instead, reporters have preferred to populate their pieces with numbers and repetitious quotes supporting the meme.
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