By Dave Lindorff
Let me start out with full disclosure: I’m 69 and next April I will start collecting $30.000 a year in Social Security benefits — the amount I qualify for on the basis of both my highest 35 years of earnings as an employed and later self-employed journalist, and because I’ve waited until I hit 70, the maximum age for starting to collect benefits, before starting to receive my checks.
So it particularly galls me to read news articles about that program (and Medicare) saying things like:
New warnings about cuts to Social Security and Medicare are a reason to worry
Social Security is Running Out and Nobody Will Like the Solution
and Ryan’s Retirement Won’t End the Social Security Debate
Such ill-informed and often deliberately scare-mongering pieces make my blood boil, particularly because I know they are targeted at younger readers, where the goal is to make them believe that Social Security is not going to be there for them, and so they should stop supporting the whole program. Take, for example, the dire stories warning that the Social Security program this year has begun drawing funds from the Social Security Trust Fund. Actually, as I explain later, that was what the Trust Fund was created for! It was advanced funding for when more funding would be needed.
For years, the defense against a concerted drive by the right to whittle away and kill Social Security has been a solid lobby of the elderly who know how important the program is. They for years made it a “Third Rail” that politicians challenged at their risk. But now the strategy appears to be to say, “We won’t take Social Security away from current retirees or people about to retire, but younger people will have to expect something less or a privatized solution.”
This article is addressed to those younger Americans — people just starting to work, on up to those in their 40s and early ’50s, because it’s really you who are being conned and who need to start fighting back to keep what was created for all of us some 83 years ago.
Forget all the propaganda! The reality is that Social Security is not an actuarial problem of too many people living too long. It’s a socio-political problem: Do we as a people want to adequately fund the retirement of our elderly parents and of those suffering from disabilities or do we want to go back to an era where they ended up starving on the streets, or as a burden to their children? If we want a decent, secure old age, the money is there to fund it. What’s needed is the political will and power to demand it.
The same can be said of Medicare and of health care in general. Do we as a society want health care to be good for those with money, and shitty or nonexistent for those without it? It’s not that solutions don’t exist…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to:www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3908