Last week I entered our little company lunchroom and immediately became embroiled in a heated political discussion. Being one of the few, older, non-management employees, some of the younger employees were interested in my take on the presidential election. Here’s the story I told them:
Way back when I was a small child, my parents would take me and my older sister visiting on Sunday afternoons. When you’re in the struggling working class, you don’t have a lot of extra income to do exotic, interesting things on weekends. The rhythm of your life consists of your parents working 5 or 6 days a week, and doing needed chores around the house on Saturday. Sundays were reserved for church in the morning, and visiting friends and relatives in the afternoon.
Occasionally, especially during the holidays, we’d visit some of the elderly people on the distant branches of our family tree. If they were still living in the family residence well into their old age, it was regarded as a major accomplishment. Some of the widows and widowers lived in mother-in-law flats, or in the attic or basement bedrooms of their extended families. Some, all too many actually, lived in tiny apartments in the “not too nice” parts of the city. In this regard, our family accurately reflected the overall state of affairs for the elderly across the nation in the mid-1950’s. In those days, the poverty rate for retirees was somewhere between 35 and 40 percent, two or three times what it was for the general population.
It wasn’t until the late 1950’s and early 60’s when Michael Harrington’s book “The Other America”, and TV documentaries about Appalachia and other pockets of poverty that our society started to take notice of those living in scarcity. After a lifetime of struggle and hard work, people like my relatives simply didn’t have sufficient income to buy food, pay the utility bills, and purchase needed healthcare. They could do one, or maybe two, but certainly not all three things on a continual basis. Untold millions of elderly people suffered from malnutrition, often resorting to hand outs and eating cat food. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, died every year from treatable illnesses, and thousands more died from head stroke or pneumonia because they couldn’t afford to heat or cool their apartments.
Fortunately, we also had some compassionate people in Congress and the Whitehouse. In the 1960’s, they increased and indexed Social Security payments, and created Medicare and Medicaid. Coupled with increased overall prosperity for the middle class, these programs helped reduce the poverty rate for those over age 65 to around 9 percent. Conservatives who rail against the “welfare state” and claim that the antipoverty programs of the Great Society were a huge wasteful failure, want you to conveniently forget that we did make major strides in improving the fortunes of at least one group… the elderly.
Now we have Romney/Ryan budget plan, and the experts say it doesn’t add up. They say that the only way we could avoid huge increases to the deficit would be to increase taxes on the middle class. Well, maybe not the only way... we could always destroy the “entitlement programs”. Conservatives have always hated these programs, and they’ve admitted that they want to privatize Social Security, turn Medicaid into block grants, and end Medicare as we know it. What makes you think that, once in power, they wouldn’t just gradually phase out the programs altogether?
Is that what it’s come to? Is that how far we’ve fallen as a society? Economic Darwinism? Really?! Survival of the richest? Really?! People are now willing to throw Grandma under the bus in order to bribe the super wealthy into not sending our jobs to China? At least until the next time? Really?!